[Haskell-cafe] In what language...?

[Andrew Coppin]

On 15/10/2010 09:42 PM, Gregory Collins wrote:
> Andrew Coppin<andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>  writes:
>
>> Does anybody have any idea which particular dialect of pure math this
>> paper is speaking? (And where I can go read about it...)
> It's pretty garden-variety programming language/type theory.

Hypothesis: The fact that the average Haskeller thinks that this kind of 
dense cryptic material is "pretty garden-variety" notation possibly 
explains why normal people think Haskell is scary.

> I can
> recommend Benjamin Pierce's "Types and Programming Languages" textbook
> for an introduction to the material:
> http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/

If I were to somehow obtain this book, would it actually make any sense 
whatsoever? I've read too many maths books which assume you already know 
truckloads of stuff, and utterly fail to make sense until you do. (Also, 
being a somewhat famous book, it's presumably extremely expensive...)

Type theory doesn't actually interest me, I just wandered what the hell 
all the notation means.