rank-2 vs. arbitrary rank types

[Atze Dijkstra]

On  6 Feb, 2007, at 19:59 , Iavor Diatchki wrote:

>
> Anyways, it seems that most people are in favor of the rank-N
> proposal.  How to proceed?  I suggest that we wait a little longer to
> see if any more comments come in and then if I am still the only
> supporter for rank-2 we should be democratic and go with rank-N :-)
> If anyone has pros and cons for either proposal (I find examples very
> useful!) please post them.
>
> I guess another important point is to make sure that when we pick a
> design, then we have at least one (current) implementation that
> supports it (ideally, all implementations would eventually).  Could we
> get a heads up from implementors about the the current status and
> future plans in this area of the type checker?

I have set up a page (http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/Ehc/RankN) with some  
of the examples used in this thread as they are treated by EHC. Most  
of the proposed extensions are accepted by EHC. As such it can be  
used to play and experiment with. However, although we are busy  
packaging EHC as a Haskell compiler and I think EHC can be helpful in  
this discussion as a prototype, we are not yet at the point where the  
system is usable as a Haskell compiler; too many obvious necessities  
(like a manual :-() are still missing.

regards,

                 - Atze -

Atze Dijkstra, Department of Information and Computing Sciences. /|\
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