[Haskell-cafe] Is Show special? Of course not but...

[Cristiano Paris]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 20:00, Daniel Fischer
<daniel.is.fischer at googlemail.com> wrote:
> ...
> It's because there's no way to determine the type variable a (in either
> wrong or right).

That's what I thought when I wrote the code at first but then I was
surprised to see it working with the Show type-class.

> In such cases, under some circumstances, the type variable gets defaulted
> (the ambiguous contexts all must have the form (C a), at least one numeric
> class [Num, Integral, Fractional, ...] is involved, all involved classes
> come from the Prelude or the standard libraries) as specified in the report
> (section 4.3, iirc).

I'm reading it right now.

> ...
> These conditions are not met by your 'right' function, but ghci uses
> extended default rules, a type variable a with a Show constraint [and no
> other] gets defaulted to (). But ghci has no rule how to default your Dumb
> class, so it reports the ambiguous type variable there.
> [Without extended defaulting rules, ambiguous type variable errors would be
> too frequent at the ghci prompt.]

God! It seems like I'm reading the small-character lines of a contract :)

Seriously, now it makes sense...

Thank you.

-- 
Cristiano

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