If you're talking about BANGPATTERNS, that is completely normal in Haskell. Pretty much any non-trivial Haskell program (and many trivial ones too) will have !

If you're talking about BANGPATTERNS, that is completely normal in Haskell. Pretty much any non-trivial Haskell program (and many trivial ones too) will have !'s in various places to force something to be strict, and to use the ! syntax you do need to add a pragma. Those pragmas are what let Haskell evolve new features without breaking backward compatibility, so Haskell programs tend to have a lot of them. Perhaps one day we'll have a new standard (it's been 19 years since the last one) which will include some of the pragmas by default. In the meanwhile, it's possible to turn the common ones on project-wide and just forget about them.