On Wed, 30 Mar 2005, Jacques Carette wrote:
> But theory is also advancing rapidly.  Haskell 6.4's inclusion of GADTs in
> the core language is exerting a powerful pull on me.

I know exactly what you mean :-).

I'm sure you're aware that people at INRIA are working on GADT's as well.
I have to say, the idea is intriguing, I first read about them from Ralf Hinze's
"Fun With Phantom Types"  where he suggests using them to do away with type
classes in Haskell. One problem with all of these "sexy types" is that as you
cram all of this into a language, it gets very complex if you don't throw
something else out. What should get thrown out of OCaml if GADTs get in? :-/


> On another front, System E looks like a promising 'replacement' for System F
> based polymorphism - that might be a 'radical' change ;-).  But right now metaocaml is keeping me
> programming in ocaml...

When it's integrated into the mainstream release, including the
native code compiler (only bytecode last time I looked) I'll look again.

-- Brian