On Tue, 28 Sep 1999, Fergus Henderson wrote: > > That's far from clear. Certainly, I don't think it's likely to be > > reasonably possible a conversative extension. > > I think it could be. > However, whether it is in "the spirit of Haskell" is another question. > > Mercury supports both type classes and ad-hoc overloading. > You can define two different symbols with the same name in > different modules and import them into another module > and the compiler will use your type declarations to disambiguate. > You can define the same symbol with different arities (number of parameters) > within a single module, and the compiler will use the types and the > context to disambiguate. > > 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. And I find this preferable to making > the explicit type annotations part of the symbol names, which is > what I currently tend to do when writing Haskell. > I am glad that SOMEONE agrees with me. Anyone else --- Kevin Atkinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://metalab.unc.edu/kevina/
