[Haskell-cafe] Early feedback on a GHC proposal

[Mario Blažević]

On 2017-01-24 03:07 AM, Chris Smith wrote:
> Anyone want to offer some early feedback on a GHC proposal I'm working
> on?  It's called OverloadedApplication.  Current version
> at https://github.com/cdsmith/ghc-proposals/blob/overloadedapplication/proposals/0000-overloaded-application.rst

	I like the proposal overall. One question you haven't addressed is 
whether the backtick syntax `f` should apply to all IsFunction 
instances, or only to functions like now. You should also explain what 
you expect to happen if the {-# LANGUAGE OverloadedApplication #-} 
pragma is plunked on top of an existing module and some IsFunction 
instances imported. Do you expect any Haskell2010 module to remain 
completely unaffected? If so, I presume there must be some defaulting 
rules to prefer the plain old function application.

> I'd love to get early thoughts from anyone who has a solid use case
> for the rest of the proposal. It feels like a thing that *ought* to
> be useful, but I'm drawing blanks at the moment.

	I haven't looked into it deeply, but it may be possible to re-implement 
something like the idiom brackets (for a particular Applicative 
instance) using this proposal.