[Haskell-cafe] Re: Proposal: TypeDirectedNameResolution

[Dan Doel]

On Tuesday 28 July 2009 8:27:53 pm Richard O'Keefe wrote:
> Right.  That settles it:  TDNR is a bad idea.
> Half fun and full earnest.
>
> I'm a fan of overloading as done in Ada, but the way
> C++ does it has always struck me as a mix of under-useful
> and over-complex, and my experience with it in practice
> has not been that marvellous.  (C++ has far too many
> types that are _sort of_ compatible, but only sort of.)

Amusingly enough, one of the major items going into C++0x was concepts, which 
are an effort to add type class-alike restrictions to C++'s current completely 
ad-hoc overloading. They were only recently dropped due to disagreements about 
certain details (I think I read that people couldn't agree whether programmers 
should be forced to declare the analogue of class instances, or whether the 
compiler should figure it out, but I haven't paid close attention, so that may 
be inaccurate).

-- Dan