Quo vadis?

[Philippa Cowderoy]

On 09/10/2018 00:58, Mario Blažević wrote:
> On 2018-10-07 11:32 PM, Philippa Cowderoy wrote:
>>
>> I'd be remiss if I didn't suggest a candidate with a specific 
>> problem, a specific goal and a possible solution to its problem. So, 
>> a modest proposal:
>>
>> - Standardise OverloadedStrings as an available-but-disabled feature
>> - Allow default statements for the IsString class without 
>> OverloadedStrings, using that type for all string literals
>> - At some future stage, we can use this to migrate away from [Char] 
>> as the default string literal type
>> - The Haskell2010 pragma and its successors can be used to ensure 
>> code written to standard doesn't suffer bit rot when migration happens
>
>
> The second bullet point could use some clarification. Would you mind 
> commenting on the existing defaulting proposal at 
> https://github.com/haskell/rfcs/pull/18 ?
>
>

I've been away from the overall process and I'm not in best health right 
now, so it'll take a while to catch up but I'll do my best.

The gist (which someone else may have covered) is that it's not 
overloading if you have exactly one type of string literals, even if we 
let the user say which type it is. I've read enough to see I'll have to 
have my thinking cap on while writing much more than that as a useful 
comment though, not least because of the interaction with an imported 
defaults mechanism that normally needs to work with a sequence of defaults.