No import of Prelude

Question

Is it possible to not load the Prelude when compiling a Haskell module?

Answer

You can either do

import Prelude()

or add

{-# LANGUAGE NoImplicitPrelude #-}

to the top of the module, or equivalently compile with -XNoImplicitPrelude (or older -fno-implicit-prelude) option.

import Prelude() is less aggressive than NoImplicitPrelude. E.g. with the first method some functions are imported which are silently inserted for several syntactic constructs. A bare untyped integral number is rewritten as fromIntegral num (so its type will be Num a => a), and list generation syntax is rewritten as follows: [n..] $\to$ enumFrom, [n..m] $\to$ enumFromTo, [n,o..] $\to$ enumFromThen, [n,o..m] $\to$ enumFromThenTo.

There are some such for which even -fno-implicit-prelude isn't enough; I think these are documented in the "bugs" section of the GHC manual.

See also

• Haskell-Cafe: Not to load Prelude