> Wouldn't you say then that "Church encoding" is still the more appropriate > reference given that Boehm-Berarducci's algorithm is rarely used? > > When I need to encode pattern matching it's goodbye Church and hello Scott. > Aside from your projects, where else is the B-B procedure used?
First of all, the Boehm-Berarducci encoding is inefficient only when doing an operation that is not easily representable as a fold. Quite many problems can be efficiently tackled by a fold. Second, I must stress the foundational advantage of the Boehm-Berarducci encoding: plain System F. Boehm-Berarducci encoding uses _no_ recursion: not at the term level, not at the type level. In contrast, the efficient for pattern-match encodings need general recursive types. With such types, a fix-point combinator becomes expressible, and the system, as a logic, becomes inconsistent. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
