Re: What *I* thinks Haskell Needs.

[George Russell]

Kevin Atkinson wrote:
[snip]
> 1) Support for true ad-hoc overloading.
[snip] 
> 2) Support for TRUE OO style programming.
[snip]
> 4) Being able to write
>   do a <- getLine
>      b <- getLine
>      proc a b
> as
>   proc getLine getLine
[snip]
AAARRRGGH no.  I don't like overloading.  For one thing it makes it a bore
working out what any given function call means.  Haskell takes it about as
far as it goes, but I don't want to go any further.  For example, I would much
prefer to maintain
  do a <- getLine
     b <- getLine
     proc a b
since all the action is clearly written out.  I don't have to know that
getLine is an IO something and deduce automatic coercion.

If anything we should be trying to simplify Haskell's type system, not
complicate it.  I would welcome a better way of doing multi-parameter
type classes, but that seems to be something of a research problem
right now.