[Haskell-cafe] OverloadedStrings mixed with type classes leads to boilerplate type signatures

[Johan Tibell]

Hi,

I'm trying to generalize my string substitution library
(http://hackage.haskell.org/package/template) to allow users to
provide different kinds of key/value mappings (e.g. functions and
association lists) for filling in the placeholders in a template. Here
are two examples I'd like to work:

    ghci> :set -XOverloadedStrings
    ghci> "$name ate a banana." % [("name", "Johan")]
    "Johan ate a banana."
    ghci> "$name ate a banana." % (\v -> if v == "name" then "Johan"
else error "KeyError")
    "Johan ate a banana."

At the moment the context (i.e. the second argument to "%") is always a function

    type Context = T.Text -> T.Text

I would like to generalize that to

    class Context a where
        lookup :: a -> T.Text -> T.Text

Different key/value mappings fulfill different use cases:

 * Association lists have a small syntactic overhead, great for
one-off string substitution.
 * Functions are flexible, allowing for arbitrary complex lookup
logic, but are syntactically heavy (in this case.)

Here's the gist of my implementation:

    {-# LANGUAGE FlexibleInstances #-}
    module Template where

    import Data.Maybe (fromMaybe)
    import qualified Data.Text as T
    import qualified Data.Text.Lazy as LT
    import Prelude as P

    class Context a where
        lookup :: a -> T.Text -> T.Text

    instance Context (T.Text -> T.Text) where
        lookup f = f

    instance Context [(T.Text, T.Text)] where
        lookup xs k = fromMaybe (error $ "KeyError: " ++ show k) (P.lookup k xs)

    -- | Perform string substitution.  Example:
    --
    -- > "$foo" % [("foo" :: T.Text, "bar" :: T.Text)]
    (%) :: Context c => T.Text -> c -> LT.Text
    (%) = undefined

The problem is that the compiler is not able to deduce that string
literals should have type 'Text' when used in 'Context's. For example

    ghci> :t "$foo" % [("foo", "bar")]

    <interactive>:1:8:
        No instance for (Context [(a, a1)])
          arising from a use of `%'
        Possible fix: add an instance declaration for (Context [(a, a1)])
        In the expression: "$foo" % [("foo", "bar")]

This forces the user to provide explicit type signatures, which makes
the construct more heavy weight and defeats the whole purpose of
introducing the 'Context' class:

    ghci> :t "$foo" % [("foo" :: T.Text, "bar" :: T.Text)]
    "$foo" % [("foo" :: T.Text, "bar" :: T.Text)] :: LT.Text

Is there any way to make the syntactically short `"$foo" % [("foo",
"bar")]` work but still keep the 'Context' class?

Johan