> The problem with this is that there is a performance penalty to be
> paid for overloading a function in this way. `take' is implemented as
> a function of two arguments, as you would expect. It is given a
> number and a list; it has no idea what type the list has, nor does it
> need to: it just picks elements off it and returns them.
In Hugs, there's no need to do the dictionary passing because it has a
polymorphic show function (used to be called show', is it something like
primShow now?). In GHC, you can't do this kind of built-in overloading
because there isn't enough type information in the heap at run-time, so
you'd have to do the dictionary passing.
Cheers,
Simon
