[Haskell-cafe] "add ifM and whenM to Control.Monad" and other discussions like that

[Yuri de Wit]

I haven't been around for long in the Haskell community, but I have seen a
few of these discussions taking long email rounds in different mailing
lists.

I don't have a strong opinion at this point to add my vote here or there
one way or the other, and I do appreciate the effort made by everyone to
find a sort of consensus, as hard as that can be sometimes.

However, the question I keep asking myself is why can't the compiler
disambiguate between two definitions with the same name based on the actual
argument types?

This would allow packages to choose their own names for functions without
such global-naming discussions and without much pain when using them.

e.g.:

> import PackageA (when)
> import PackageB (when)

> when (Just True) doSomething

versus:

> when True 1

Is there a theoretical or practical issue that makes this an undesirable
feature in Haskell?
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