Re: [Caml-list] ambitious proposal: polymorphic arithmetics

[Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org>]

On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 08:43:01PM +0400, Dmitry Lomov wrote:
> Richard Jones wrote:
> >The problem, I'm guessing, is that you add polymorphic +, -, and so
> >on.  But that's really just a hack in the language.  Sooner or later
> >people are going to ask why it's not possible to write a polymorphic
> >'print' function, _without_ hacking the language some more.  At that
> >point you need a theory, and you need something like G'Caml, or type
> >classes, or GADTS.
> 
> Pardon my ignorance, but how are GADTs are going to help in this regard?
> I thought GADTs are basically data types with constructors that have
> non-uniform "return type".

Pardon _my_ ignorance.  I read something about using GADTs to simulate
class types in the paper, and assumed that they are equivalent, but
I'm probably wrong.

Rich.

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