type aliases and Id

[Stefan Holdermans]

Ian,

Mmm...

> * Allow "type Id =" (I prefer this to "type Id" as I think we are more
>   likely to want to use the latter syntax for something else later  
> on).

Looks kind of funny; I'm not too thrilled.

> * Implementations should eta-reduce all type synonyms as much as
>   possible, e.g.
>       type T a b c d = X a b Int c d
>   is equivalent to
>       type T a b     = X a b Int
>   and
>       type Id a = a
>   is equivalent to a type that cannot be expressed directly.

I like this alternatie a bit better, but I can also see how it  
introduces a lot of potential confusing, especially for novice  
Haskell programmers. You write something and the compiler goes along  
with something else...

Maybe this will serve as a source of inspiration: http:// 
portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=581478.581496 [1].

Cheers,

   Stefan

[1] Matthias Neubauer and Peter Thiemann. Type classes with more  
higher-order poly-
morphism. In Proceedings of the Seventh ACM SIGPLAN International  
Conference on
Functional Programming (ICFP ’02), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA,  
October 4–-6, 2002,
pages 179–-190. ACM Press, 2002.