[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] pros and cons of static typing andside effects ?

[Ralf Lammel]

I don't even want this feature. :-)
The point being that datatype declarations, *as such*, are explicit
anyhow.
Why bother about the explicit quantifiers then?
Of course, in a language with inferred datatypes I would mind.
That's an interesting question!

I also wouldn't (yet?!) support this feature request
because we will still confuse beginners, but that's just my feeling.

Ralf

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stefan Holdermans [mailto:stefan at cs.uu.nl]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2005 11:48 PM
> To: Ralf Lammel
> Cc: haskell-cafe at haskell.org; Benjamin Franksen
> Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] pros and cons of static
typing
> andside effects ?
> 
> Ralf,
> 
> > Technically this is trivial it seems. I think that some people
> > consider this proposal a problem because typos (misspelled type
> > parameters) immediately lead to the accidental exploration of a more
> > advanced type-system feature and correspondingly more involved error
> > messages. Of course, the type checker could perhaps consider adding
> > "Did you really mean to ...?".
> 
> Well, okay, but as soon as the type checker starts to asking these
> questions, I would immediately start adding the explicit quantifiers,
> just to get rid of those annoying warning messages. ;) So one would we
> also need to be able to control the behaviour of the type checker with
> respect to these warnings by means of a compiler flag like
> "fno-warn-on-implicit-existential-quantification". All of this is, of
> course, still trivial. :)
> 
> Have we thought about it enough to make it a feature request?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Stefan