[Haskell-cafe] historical question about Haskell and Haskell Curry

[Conor McBride]

On 19 Jul 2007, at 03:40, Tim Chevalier wrote:

> On 7/18/07, Michael Vanier <mvanier at cs.caltech.edu> wrote:
>> We always say that Haskell is named for Haskell Curry because his  
>> work provided the
>> logical/computational foundations for the language.  How exactly  
>> is this the case?  Specifically,
>> does anyone claim that Curry's combinatorial logic is more  
>> relevant to the theoretical foundations
>> of Haskell than e.g. Church's lambda calculus?  If not, why isn't  
>> Haskell called "Alonzo"? ;-)
>
> I'd guess it's because Haskell is a language that provides type
> inference, and Curry's logic is implicitly typed, whereas Church's
> typed lambda calculus is typed explicitly. (Why no Haskell compilers'
> intermediate languages are named "Alonzo" is left as an exercise for
> the reader :-)

On the hand, Marcin Benke's compiler for the Agda 2 dependently typed
programming language is called Alonzo. But it uses an intermediate
language named after Curry...

Dependent type systems rely on having a bit more type information around
(although not usually on a lambda, if you set things up well), so the
connection with Church is perhaps more appropriate.

Cheers

Conor