seeking ideas for short lecture on type classes

[Andrew J Bromage]

G'day all.

On Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 06:13:29PM -0500, Norman Ramsey wrote:

> In a fit of madness, I have agreed to deliver a 50-minute lecture
> on type classes to an audience of undergraduate students.  These
> students will have seen some simple typing rules for F2 and will
> have some exposure to Hindley-Milner type inference in the context
> of ML.

Will they have had exposure to more "traditional" OO programming?  If
so, it might be useful to note the difference between Haskell type
classes and C++/Java/whatever classes, namely that Haskell decouples
types and the interfaces that they support.  The advantage is that you
can extend a type with a new interface at any point, not just when you
define the type.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage