The suggestion of a "types that specialize to/unify with this type" search would be really useful.
My main interest in Haskell is as a "scripting language" for semantic web applications (cf [1] et seq). Your comment suggests a possible application that might be built from the tools I'm currently developing [4].
I would guess it would be feasible to modify Haddock to generate RDF [2] descriptions of library functions as an alternative to HTML (or, maybe better still, generate a form of XHTML with additional embedded markup that can be used to extract RDF from HTML using a simple XSLT stylesheet, cf. [3]).
It would be an interesting test of my inference toolkit to see if it can handle the unification required to match function signatures for this; I think it would be moderately straightforward to do in bare Haskell (not having to worry too much about language corner cases for such an application).
#g --
[1] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2003-February/011222.html -- cites article about what makes a popular language: http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/ and http://www.w3.org/RDF/
[3] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/200207/rsscal/xslt-rss-events.html -- This is an example of using one of several techniques described in: http://infomesh.net/2002/rdfinhtml/
[4] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2003-June/012013.html -- Announcing first phase of my Swish software, with links
------------ Graham Klyne For email: http://www.ninebynine.org/#Contact
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