type equality symbol

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| > Nothing deep.  Just that "=" means so many things that it seemed better
| > to use a different notation.
| >
|
| How about ==? Only one meaning so far, and that both on the term level and
| equivalent to the constraint

I'm quite happy with "~"!  It's sufficiently different from "=" that someone meeting it for the first time is going to thing "hmm, better read the manual"; and they'd be right.

Anyway, while on this subject, I am considering making the following change:

        make all operator symbols into type constructors
        (currently they are type variables)

That would allow you to write
        data a * b = Prod a b
        data a + b = Left a | Right b
and write natural-looking types like
        f :: a*b -> a

When we have indexed type families working, this will be even more natural.

As things stand, only operators starting with a ":" are type constructors, thus
        data a :*: b = Prod a b
etc.  By analogy with the term language, operators are currently classified as "type variables", so you could write (oddly)
        data T (+) x = MkT (+) x
[this may not even work today, but it should] to mean the same as
        data T y x = MkT y x
But this is pretty useless!  Very occasionally one might want a type variable with kind (*->*->*), but much much more often you want a type *constructor* with that kind.

I thought I'd mention this here in case people have ideas.

Simon