Over the last weeks folks have been sending results and code samples of the experiment proposed on this thread with many cases where the code got considerably more verbose and less readable, such as integration with Erlang APIs, configurations that expect lists of char lists and so on. For those reasons, we have decided to avoid the change because, for such a big change, the core team should be at least 90% on board it is a positive change and we did not have such consensus anymore. Thanks for pinging back here, I forgot to update this thread.

That’s a very good idea and would clear confusion. Kudos.

Would you also consider adding another more specialized function and allow it in case / cond / etc.? I’m thinking about something like is_charlist/1? Maybe add List.is_printable?/1 as well? And allow is_charlist / List.is_printable? / String.is_printable? in case, cond, when and friends?

Or do you think it’s a better practice not to enforce these in when function declarations but to validate parameters in such a manner first thing in a function?

Apologies for slight off-topic.

This proposal seems to have been closed quite suddenly. Anyone have an update on why? The discussion thread on the elixir-lang-core group seems to be neutral-to-positive as well.