On 27-Sep-1999, Alex Ferguson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Fergus Henderson, replying to me:
> > > That's far from clear. Certainly, I don't think it's likely to be
> > > reasonably possible a conversative extension.
>
> [...]
> > Ad-hoc overloading and type inference don't mix so well, because
> > you can easily get ambiguities which the compiler cannot resolve.
> > However, the user can add explicit type annotations where necessary
> > to resolve the ambiguities.
>
> If you can can ambiguities arising in what would otherwise be a well-typed
> Haskell program, then that'd make it a non-conservative (which I shall
> spell right, this time) extension, in my book.
No, you only get ambiguities if there are two symbols that have the same
name both in scope at the same time, and currently that can't happen in
a well-typed Haskell program. So I believe it would be conservative,
at least up until the point where you start modifying the Haskell
standard library to take advantage of it...
--
Fergus Henderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh> | of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] | -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
