By "we" I meant reikonomusha and myself, as the context made plain. I don't see how calling something an ugly hack isn't a form of calling it bad, but never min

By "we" I meant reikonomusha and myself, as the context made plain. I don't see how calling something an ugly hack isn't a form of calling it bad, but never mind. 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.