Suggestion: Syntactic sugar for Maps!

[Don Stewart]

dons:
> circularfunc:
> > I suggest Haskell introduce some syntactic sugar for Maps.
> > 
> > Python uses {"this": 2, "is": 1, "a": 1, "Map": 1}
> > 
> > Clojure also use braces: {:k1 1 :k2 3} where whitespace is comma but
> > commas are also allowed.
> > 
> > I find the import Data.Map and then fromList [("hello",1), ("there",
> > 2)] or the other form that I forgot(because it is to long!) to be to
> > long...
> > 
> > So why not {"hello": 1, "there": 2} ?
> > 
> 
> Well, one problem is that we don't have a definitive Map library. Which
> kind of Map would you like? IntMap/Map/AVLTree? Some other tree?
> 
> That said, you could certainly write a little
> preprocessor/quasiquoting/template haskell for dictionary literals.
> 


Perhaps overloaded *dictionary* literal syntax?
So we could have

    instance Dictionary Map k
    instance Dictionary IntMap
    instance Dictionary HashTable
    instance Dictionary Trie k

etc. 

That would be pretty awesome..