[Haskell-cafe] Language extensions [was: Memoization]
Andrew Coppin
andrewcoppin at btinternet.com
Sun May 27 09:19:51 EDT 2007
apfelmus wrote:
> Andrew Coppin wrote:
>
>>>> OOC, can anybody tell me what ∀ actually means anyway?
>>>>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_quantification
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_F
>
So... ∀x . P means that P holds for *all* x, and ∃ x . P means that x
holds for *some* x? (More precisely, at least 1 possible choice of x.)
>> I do recall that GHC has some weird extension called "existential
>> quantification"
>>
>
> http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Existential_types
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Existentially_quantified_types
>
Erm... oh...kay... That kind of makes *slightly* more sense now...
Seriously. Haskell seems to attract weird and wonderful type system
extensions like a 4 Tesla magnet attracts iron nails... And most of
these extensions seem to serve no useful purpose, as far as I can
determine. And yet, all nontrivial Haskell programs *require* the use of
at least 3 language extensions. It's as if everyone thinks that Haskell
98 sucks so much that it can't be used for any useful programs. This
makes me very sad. I think Haskell 98 is a wonderful language, and it's
the language I use for almost all my stuff. I don't understand why
people keep trying to take this small, simple, clean, elegant language
and bolt huge, highly complex and mostly incomprehensible type system
extensions onto it...
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