On 1 Feb 2007, at 21:31, Jacques Carette wrote:
Stephanie Weirich wrote:
I don't think we want to allow types like:
forall . Int or forall a b. Int
These types are mostly bugs. Furthermore, rejecting them doesn't
limit expressiveness:
If you restrict yourself to programs entirely written by humans, I
agree completely. But if you consider programs written by programs
(say Template Haskell to be specific, but it could be via many
other means), such degenerate types occur rather often.
I find the "program-generated code" argument rather weak. In that
past it was used to justify all kinds of minor horrors like excess
commas in lists and so on. But if one can write a program to
generate syntactically valid but ugly code, one can easily spend a
little extra effort on making the result beautiful too. After all,
which is the more difficult task - devising the auto-coding schema,
or pretty-printing? There is no reason to accept ugly coding
practices just because it makes the auto-coder's job slightly
simpler. That only encourages humans to use sloppy practices in hand-
written code as well.
Regards,
Malcolm
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