Malcolm Wallace wrote:
Unfortunately, I suspect that teaching is _the_ major use-case for defaulting. Imagine, day one, lesson one, a student typesPrelude> 1+2 into Hugs, and gets the response Unresolved overloading: Num a Huh? This is lesson one, and you already need to tell students about type classes and overloading, before you have even covered simple expressions fully? I am certain this is the reason why defaulting was introduced.
I propose we abandon "teaching" arguments for design choices entirely. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, they don't apply to the majority of Haskell users, and secondly, they almost always misapprehend the language-learning process.
To give you a vague example, when I was learning ML, what appealed to me was the sense of cleanliness and purity about the language. Any apparent weirdness was fine, as long as I could discover the elegant reason behind it. This right up until finding out about references, which bothered me so much that I dropped it and learnt Haskell instead.
That something might confuse the beginning user should count for nothing if it does not annoy the more experienced user.
-- Ashley Yakeley _______________________________________________ Haskell-prime mailing list Haskell-prime@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime
