[Haskell-cafe] Re: Overloading functions based on arguments?

[Daniel Kraft]

Colin Adams wrote:
> If you have two functions that do two different things, then they
> certainly OUGHT to have different names.

Well, they do "the same thing" but for different arguments; it's like this:

Table is a table of name-value pairs I want to substitute in a tree-like 
structure using:

substitute :: Table -> Tree -> Tree

For substituting a single name-value pair I want to define this utitlity 
routine so I don't have to construct a Table all the time in the user code:

substitute :: String -> Value -> Tree -> Tree

In the case I believe it would certainly be good to be able to name both 
functions the same, but I fear I can not do so?  There are languages 
where this is explicitelly allowed (e.g. C++ or Java), so I don't think 
it is such an unuseful or evil thing.

Daniel