[Haskell-cafe] Re: Type-level arithmetic

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

Dan Piponi wrote,
> On 10/12/07, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH <allbery at ece.cmu.edu> wrote:
> 
>> He wants to write entire programs in the type system,
>> something like the crazies who write programs in C++ templates such
>> that template expansion does all the work at compile time
> 
> Crazies? :-)
> http://homepage.mac.com/sigfpe/Computing/peano.html
> 
> Having switched from C++ to Haskell (at least in my spare time) I
> thought I'd escaped that kind of type hackery but it seems to be
> following me...

The way I see, we are trying to come up with a clean way of 
providing type-level computations (ie, we use and extend the 
standard theory of HM type systems).  C++ embedded a functional 
language in the type systems mostly by accident, whereas we do it on 
purpose.

Manuel