Hi, Yitzhack Gale wrote:
> Wouldn't it be ironic if the one thing that every language > other than Haskell is able to check at compile time, > namely the static syntax of string literals, could only be > checked at run time in Haskell? I don't really see the irony, I'm afraid, as nothing really has changed, and as Simon M. that I don't see what the fuss is about. Presumably, the syntax of string literals as such is still going to be checked by the scanner, as it always was? And the issue, then, is whether an overloaded "fromString" is total in all its overloadings? Or did I miss something central, here? Well, Haskell is not a total language, so the fact that "fromString" might have non-total overloadings is not surprising. Yes, "fromString" would be implicitly inserted, just like e.g. "fromInteger" for overloaded integer literals, to create the effect of overloaded literals, but this is really just a convenience, albeit an important one. The benefit of an approach to overloading of string literals that is analogous to the existing method for overloading of numeric literals would seem to me to outweigh the benefits of additional static checking through an essentially new approach to overloading of literals for a specific case. Best, /Henrik -- Henrik Nilsson School of Computer Science The University of Nottingham n...@cs.nott.ac.uk _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users