Contents
- What “overloaded” means
- How it works
- Alternatives to
String - Unusual instances
- ByteString
- Aeson
- Cabal
- Hazard: Type ambiguity
Video
- 13 minutes
The OverloadedStrings extension makes string literal syntax more general, allowing string literals to denote values of types other than String. This extension is often used with the text package.
There are some of the pitfalls of string overloading which we discuss below: it is troublesome for some types, and it has the potential to introduce type ambiguity. In some cases you may want to consider using QuasiQuotes, a more powerful but more cumbersome tool, instead.
Overloaded stringsGHC documentation for OverloadedStrings (and the Data.String module)Data.String first appeared in GHC 6.8.1.