Mark P Jones writes:
> Please could somebody post a short, plain text summary of the discussion
> in this thread? The recent exchanges have been long and involved, which
> has made it impossible for me (and other busy onlookers too, I suspect)
> to keep up. Without such a summary, I think that this thread may be
> reaching the end of it's useful life, at least for the main Haskell list.
I only jumped in because I thought I could nip it in the bud by clearing up
some confusion surrounding treatment of bound and free variables (OK--- also I
was irate about one other remark). Sorry, I can't summarize the rest, although
I think it is all rooted in this misinterpretation of variables.
> I make these suggestions because I sense that there is a lot of confusion,
> misunderstanding, and talking at cross purposes, and because I'm not at
> all sure that the current discussions are on course to reach a conclusion.
I agree, and I think it's hopeless. This is my last message to the Haskell
list on the subject. There is nothing Haskell-specific any longer about this
discussion.
However, I think maybe it has demonstrated that the implicit forall'ing in
Haskell can be confusing in practice. In particular, it makes it hard to talk
unambiguously about types of non-top-level definitions/terms.
--
Frank Atanassow, Dept. of Computer Science, Utrecht University
Padualaan 14, PO Box 80.089, 3508 TB Utrecht, Netherlands
Tel +31 (030) 253-1012, Fax +31 (030) 251-3791
