[Haskell-cafe] Proposal: TypeDirectedNameResolution

[Sittampalam, Ganesh]

Cale Gibbard wrote:

> There was a great related idea on #haskell the other day: Make
> explicit qualification unnecessary whenever there is a *unique*
> choice of module qualifications from those imported which would make
> the expression typecheck. Ambiguities would still need to be
> qualified, but I feel that this would eliminate 99% of all ugly
> qualified names from code. It would be especially good in the case of
> infix operators, which as far as I know, nobody actually enjoys
> qualifying explicitly.       
> 
[...]
> What do people think of this idea? Personally, it really annoys me
> whenever I'm forced to give explicit module qualifications, and I
> think this would really help. It would also subsume the
> DisambiguateRecordFields extension rather handily.   

I think this idea would severely damage compositionality. One example of
this is that it would make it substantially less likely that
subexpressions could be abstracted into a separate declaration without
giving a type signature to fix the type of the new declaration.

Ganesh

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