A Small Example Illustrating Why Unification-Based Type Inference Is Not Always The Most User-Friendly Choice

let base = 10
let bitsPerDigit = logBase 2.0 (fromIntegral base)
let activeBits = fromIntegral $
  ceiling (bitsPerDigit * (Prelude.length "123"))

There's a missing fromIntegral above, which causes GHC to underline logBase and complain that it has no instance for (Floating Int). This is, on the face of things, completely mystifying. Both parameters are “obviously” floating! A second error points to ceiling, saying no instance for (RealFrac Int).

The second error is the more suggestive one, since the problem is that the type of * causes GHC to equate the type of bitsPerDigit with that of (Prelude.length clean), i.e. Int.  But it’s more than a little strange to force the programmer to reason about their code in the same order that the type checker does!

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