> > In a fit of madness, I have agreed to deliver a 50-minute lecture > > on type classes to an audience of undergraduate students. These > > students will have seen some simple typing rules for F2 and will > > have some exposure to Hindley-Milner type inference in the context > > of ML. > > Will they have had exposure to more "traditional" OO programming? If > so, it might be useful to note the difference between Haskell type > classes and C++/Java/whatever classes, namely that Haskell decouples > types and the interfaces that they support. The advantage is that you > can extend a type with a new interface at any point, not just when you > define the type.
Hmm --- you are talking about the `instance' declarations, right? A fact that I know but don't understand the implication of is that Haskell dispatches on the static type of a value, whereas OO languages dispatch on the dynamic type of a value. But I suspect I'll leave that out :-) N _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell