String literals

[Rohan Drape]

On Mon Nov 13 12:27:08 EST 2006, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> In my experience I've seen more requests for overloaded *Boolean*
> literals than strings.  In a Fran context, for example.

Has there been discussion of the related issue, described in a Pan
paper as 'Unfortunately, the Bool type is wired into the signatures of
operations like >= and ||.'?  (I searched the trac but couldn't find
it?)

It seems common to have to write something like:

class OrdE a where
    (>*)  :: a -> a -> a
    etc.

While for finite signals both have meaning, ie.

 [1,2,3] >  [1,2,1] == True
 [1,2,3] >* [1,2,1] == [False,False,True]

for infinite signals '>' is often a nonsense, and if these are the
primary type it'd be nice to write '>' for '>*'.

Regards,
Rohan