[Haskell-cafe] Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt

[Jonathan Cast]

On Fri, 2009-01-16 at 18:14 -0500, Anton van Straaten wrote:
> Niklas Broberg wrote:
> >> I still think existential quantification is a step too far though. :-P
> > 
> > Seriously, existential quantification is a REALLY simple concept, that
> > you would learn week two (or maybe three) in any introductory course
> > on logic. In fact, I would argue that far more people probably know
> > what existential quantification is than that know what a monoid is.
> > :-)
> 
> Andrew's core objection here seems reasonable to me.  It was this:
> 
>  > {-# LANGUAGE ExistentialQuantification #-} is an absurd name and
>  > should be changed to something that, at a minimum, tells you it's
>  > something to do with the type system.
> 
> But I suspect I part company from Andrew in thinking that something like 
> ExistentiallyQuantifiedTypes would be a perfectly fine alternative.

+1

(Although shouldn't it really be ExistentiallyQuantifiedConstructorTypes
or something?  If GHC ever actually adds first-class existentials, what
is Cabal going to call *that* then?)

jcc