punning in GHC?

[Iavor S. Diatchki]

hi there,

i just discovered that GHC does not support punning with the -fglasgow-exts 
option.  is there another flag to turn this on or has it been completely 
removed?  if so could we have it back - i really like the feature (in 
patterns anyways) and use it (hugs -98 supports it).  i don't particularly 
care that it is not in haskell 98 as i rarely write haskell 98 programs. 

by the way before posting this i did a search on "punning" through the 
mailing list archive to see if someone asked this already.  i couldnt find 
anything but it seems that since 1997 there were 7 posts on "punning" and 
all of them seemed to agree that it was a useful feature, so why was it 
removed?  

bye
iavor