8.3. The Haskell Language

Referring back to John's earlier answer, what made you "drool" when you were designing the class system?

Simon: We knew we had a bunch of problems surrounding how to take equality over arbitrary types, how to show and print arbitrary types, and how to do numerics. We knew we wanted integers and floats and double-precision numbers and arbitrary position integers. We did not want the programmer to have to write plus int and plus float and plus arbitrary precision integer.