Fractional/negative fixity?

[Simon Marlow]

Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:
> I'm surprised that no one has mentioned showsPrec and readsPrec.
> Anything more complicated than negative fixities would require their
> interfaces to be changed.

That's a fine point.

So, as I see it the situation with this precedence stuff is that there were several vocal complaints about the proposal to extend precedences to allow negative and fractional precedence values, and not many proponents.  The point about showsPrec/readsPrec means that the extension is not quite as minimal as we thought, and would probably break some existing code.

Alternative schemes based on constructing a partial order between operators are being proposed, but these are out of the question for Haskell'.

So the default option is to do nothing, leaving us with the devil we know.  It's hard to guage the opinion of the community on these things, so if you strongly object to doing nothing, please speak up.

Cheers,
        Simon