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[Caml-list] "high end" type theory for working programmers?
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Chris Hecker
- Will Benton
- Michael Vanier
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Date: | 2002-05-03 (10:17) |
From: | Michael Vanier <mvanier@c...> |
Subject: | Re: [Caml-list] "high end" type theory for working programmers? |
I highly recommend Benjamin Pierce's new book "Types in Programming Languages" from MIT press. It's very well-written, covers much of the material you describe, and includes implementations in ocaml ;-) Mike > Date: Thu, 02 May 2002 17:49:25 -0700 > From: Chris Hecker <checker@d6.com> > > The list has had a lot of discussions about type theory behind the module > system, tuples, and the like lately. Most of it has been over my head, > which is fun, because it presents a challenge to try to figure out what > people are saying. I am wondering how much of it is useful for actually > writing "regular" code (as opposed to compilers or theorem provers). Are > there books (or survey papers) on this stuff that are meant to educate > working programmers, as opposed to language researchers? For example, > where should I go to learn what this means, and whether I care (just a > randomly chosen sentence representative of stuff that's currently over my > head from the past few days on the list): > > "That functor is essentially the polymorphic identity functor, while the > other variation was a polymorphic eta-expansion of the abstraction operator." > > or another example: > > "In this encoding, modules are only records, so module types are ordinary > types, and there is no distinction between ordinary abstract types > (introduced by explicit polymorphic abstraction) and ``abstract > signatures''. There is, as far as I can tell, no need for kind polymorphism." > > I started using caml to find out if a "higher level" language could make a > difference in my programming productivity (writing video games). As I > continue with that experiment, I'm curious to know whether understanding > this high end type theory stuff would help make me a better programmer, or > just more able to understand the list lately. Either is fine, but both > would obviously be great. :) > > Chris > ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners