On Mon 27 Sep, Frank A. Christoph wrote: > I must admit that I don't like the idea of determining a value based on its > type, at least in a language like Haskell. For me, functional programming is > about how to write programs combinatorially, and justifying your hypotheses > by encoding their proofs; so a type is something that ought to be uniquely > derivable from a value, not the other way around. Haskell's class system > already goes too far against this idea for my taste. > > I know that some people do not feel this way, however. I agree. This is one of the things I was griping about many moons ago on the 'pattern match success changes types' thread, but your statement above is far more eloquent. This whole overloading business seems to complicate the Haskell type system unnecessarily, and makes programs harder to understand, not easier, in my humble opinion. I think I would prefer something closer to the ML approach. Regards -- Adrian Hey
