OverloadedStrings

29 Dec 2015 - In the air, above Nevada

When the OverloadedStrings pragma is enabled, it changes the definition of String from:

type String = [Char]

to:

IsString a -> a

with IsString defined as:

class IsString a where
  fromString :: String -> a

This means that strings are now higher-kinded types and, in order to use them, we need to make them concrete by either (a) explicitly typing what we intend them to be, or (b) using the ExtendedDefaultRules languages extension.

Furthermore, if we are only interested in using a package’s IsString instance for use but will not use the package itself, we can import the package and hide all members to gain access to the IsString instance. This would look like the following:

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
import Data.ByteString.Char8 () -- only get the orphaned `IsString` instance