[Haskell-cafe] Interesting Thread on OO Usefulness (scala mailing list)

[Brent Yorgey]

On Mon, May 04, 2009 at 03:08:25PM +0200, Martijn van Steenbergen wrote:
> Andrew Wagner wrote:
>> [quote]
>> Here's [a]language to to interpret (where postfix * means tupling): 
>> Variables: x Integer literals: i Terms: t = Lambda x*. t   |  Apply t t*   
>> |  Var(x)   |  Num(i) 
>
> Can someone explain to me how I should read this? It supposedly explains 
> what the postfix * means ("tupling") but I still can only guess how it 
> translates to a Haskell datatype.

I think t* is supposed to represent an arbitrary number (a tuple) of
t's.  So in Haskell syntax, you can read t* as [t].

Hence, the language described above is not curried: lambda expressions
can have any finite number of arguments, and applications are
correspondingly some term applied to a tuple of arguments.

-Brent