Danny Yoo wrote:

>only ints.  I think OCaml's arithmetic operators are monomophic to avoid
>the cost of polymorphism.
>  
>
I'm fairly certain that type safety is a significant part of the reason; 
if they were polymorphic, they'd accept any kind of arguments, not just 
numbers.  What's the product of two strings?  A run-time type error?

Haskell doesn't suffer from this because it has type classes.

There are other type-safe ways to address the issue - SML uses 
overloading, with a fallback type of int for cases where the type of the 
expression can't be determined:

- fun f x y = x + y;
val f = fn : int -> int -> int
- fun f (x : real) y = x + y;
val f = fn : real -> real -> real

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