[Haskell-cafe] Call for discussion: OverloadedLists extension

[Heinrich Apfelmus]

Michael Snoyman wrote:
> (Prettier formatting available at: https://gist.github.com/3761252)
> 
> Many of us use the OverloadedStrings language extension on a regular
> basis. It provides the ability to keep the ease-of-use of string
> literal syntax, while getting the performance and correctness
> advantages of specialized datatypes like ByteString and Text. I think
> we can get the same kind of benefit by allowing another literal syntax
> to be overloaded, namely lists.

Actually, I am already somewhat reserved about the  OverloadedStrings 
proposal.

The core point of the OverloadedSomething extensions is that they 
address a syntactic issue, namely that we can write

   "example"

instead of

   (pack "example")

The extension does this by making the literal polymorphic.

Unfortunately, making literals polymorphic does not always achieve the 
desired effect of reducing syntax. In fact, they can instead increase 
syntax! In other words, I would like to point out that there is a 
trade-off involved: is it worth introducing a small syntactic reduction 
at the cost of both a small additional conceptual complexity and some 
syntactic enlargement elsewhere?


The increase in syntax happened to me while using one of the json 
libraries. The thing is that if a "receiver" function is agnostic in the 
string used, or if it is otherwise polymorphic,

     receive1 :: IsString s => s -> Foo
     receive2 :: JSON s => s -> Foo

then I have to specify the type of the overloaded argument (either by a 
type annotation or a monomorphic function call).

In other words, without  OverloadedStrings , I was able to write

     receive2 "example"

but with the extension, I now have to write

     receive2 (pack "example")


A similar effect can be seen with the good old numeric literals. 
Sometimes, you just have to introduce a type signature (:: Int) to make 
a program unambiguous.


In this light, I don't think that the trade-off made by the 
OverloadedLists extension is big enough.


Best regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus

--
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