For instance, use an integer at the value, rather than the type level, and turn the thing into a runtime error rather than a compile time one. Sure, and if I'd been writing in Perl, I would have done exactly that (or just not bothered, and relied on myself to either not write code that added incompatible things, or detect it in testing). But as I was writing in Haskell, and had the World's Most Advanced Type System (TM) around, and the constraints I was dealing with were clearly type-like, it was rather annoying that I couldn't express them using the type system :-) I think in the end I wrote a Perl script to generate the code for each integer I needed (this was before I learned Template Haskell). Then I graduated, got a job, and lost interest for a while.
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Re: Types
Sure, and if I'd been writing in Perl, I would have done exactly that (or just not bothered, and relied on myself to either not write code that added incompatible things, or detect it in testing). But as I was writing in Haskell, and had the World's Most Advanced Type System (TM) around, and the constraints I was dealing with were clearly type-like, it was rather annoying that I couldn't express them using the type system :-) I think in the end I wrote a Perl script to generate the code for each integer I needed (this was before I learned Template Haskell). Then I graduated, got a job, and lost interest for a while.