It's called defaulting:
http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/decls.html#sect4.3.4
In my opinion, though it wasn't me you asked, it's an ugly workaround for Haskell's lack of proper coercion rules.
http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/decls.html#sect4.3.4
In my opinion, though it wasn't me you asked, it's an ugly workaround for Haskell's lack of proper coercion rules.
ghci -XOverloadedStrings
Prelude> :m +Data.Text
Prelude Data.Text> "cargo cult"
"cargo cult"
Prelude Data.Text> :t it
it :: String
Prelude Data.Text> "cargo cult" :: Text
"cargo cult"
Prelude Data.Text> :t it
it :: Text
It is different from other systems, but doesn't that just mean you have to learn something different, which is of course annoying until it becomes second nature. There doesn't seem to be any legitimate technical objection here, or am I wrong?
I wonder who is that we you refer to. Is applicative a Bourbaki-style pseudonym for a group of aspiring Haskell hackers?
I never said it is bad, it looks like a useful and convenient mechanism. My complaint is about its non-genericity. Indeed, it is limited to numeric literals only; even to reuse it for string literals, you need a compiler extension.
A general coercion, understood as something different from a function (pack, unpack), would have to coerce between two types of wildly different structures.
By general coercion, I mean implicit conversion not limited to numeric literals (or string literals, with an extension) only.
Numeric and string literals are all that were ever under discussion. `OverloadedStrings` is a language extension, not a compiler extension; it is a candidate for inclusion in later specifications, not in the new Haskell 2010. The Ghc supports it with a language pragma. That it, and the associated IsString class, didn't exist in Haskell 98, the previous specification, is obviously due to the fact that there was not widespread use of types like ByteString and Text for handling text; if there had been it would have been, surely; the idea is pretty straightforward.