String != [Char]

[Yitzchak Gale]

Ben Millwood wrote:
> No-one's yet argued against OverloadedStrings. I think there /is/ an
> argument to be made, that it introduces ambiguity and could break
> existing programs (probably we can extend defaulting to take care of
> this, but I think there are people who'd be happier if we killed
> defaulting too).

For the record, I have a more fundamental objection to
OverloadedStrings. When library authors write partial functions
for the fromString method - and we see in practice that
they do so - it creates the shocking situation in which
invalid syntax of a literal is only caught at run time.

Instead, Haskell' should provide a pragma, or other
syntactic mechanism, by which compilers can allow
specific types other than String for string literals at
*compile* time in a monomorphic context. The
implementation of that syntax would be compiler
dependent, of course. For GHC, Template Haskell
could help. Another approach would be for a
compiler to have a built-in way of embedding, say,
Text literals directly in object code.

For people who like OverloadedStrings despite this
problem, it could be available via a pragma. But
never by default - it should be possible to get
fundamental string types like Text and ByteString
for string literals without having to turn on
OverloadedStrings. In GHC, quasi-quoters are the
right way to provide convenient user-defined syntax
for string-like types other than the canonical
string types.

Theoretically, polymorphism for numeric literals
is just as bad. But in practice, it seems to be much
more rare for people to implement fromIntegral
and fromRational with dangerous functions.

-Yitz