Newbie help features

Often a newbie comes to #haskell and asks why something doesn't work in ghci. There are at least two cases:

"why doesn't type Bar = (Char, Int) work"?

and

"why doesn't f = 1 work?" (that is function definitions)

It wouldn't be much work to recognize these cases and then give the user some hints on putting those definitions into a file, etc.

Another case where error messages can be improved is the following:

type Foo = (char, int) -- the intention is clear, but the error message might not be clear to a new user. Suggestion: when the parsed type variables are the same modulo case to an existing core type(Int, Bool, Array, etc) and Foo doesn't take those type parameters, tell the user he needs to use proper casing.

Trac metadata

Trac field	Value
Version	6.6.1
Type	FeatureRequest
TypeOfFailure	OtherFailure
Priority	low
Resolution	Unresolved
Component	GHCi
Test case
Differential revisions
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Related
Blocking
CC
Operating system	Unknown
Architecture	Unknown