Hi Mark,
thanks a lot for the private lesson. I have downloaded various papers
and started to read them. I'm just done with the Wadler/Blott paper.
I already suspected that I was partly reinventing the wheel with my
translation of type classes. It turned out that my approach is exactly
the same as the Wadler/Blott translation. I didn't expect my approach to
be so close to the "standard" solution, but now this gives me the good
feeling that I might have understood the stuff. In hindsight the reason
for the close similarity is of course the "user-level" understanding
that I had of type classes before.
You were mentioning rank-2 polymorphism in your message. It was exactly
that beast (and also second-order lambda calculus) that I was afraid of
when I was unsure whether my transformation does its job. I feared that
these beasts (which I don't understand yet, but hope to after working
through the pile of downloaded papers) were indispensable for type
classes. Now I see that they are not, at least for the basic case.
Regards,
Heribert.
PS: What I meant with "dependent types" were the ideas in Cayenne.
