The Haskell Unfolder Episode 43: monomorphism restriction and defaulting

Will be streamed today, 2025-05-07, at 1830 UTC, live on YouTube.

Abstract:

In this episode, we are going to look at two interacting “features” of the Haskell language (the monomorphism restriction and defaulting) that can be somewhat surprising, in particular to newcomers: there are situations where Haskell’s type inference algorithm deliberately refuses to infer the most general type. We are going to look at a number of examples, explain what exactly is going on, and why.

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