[darcs-devel] back from ICFP (and roadmap)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Sat Oct 8 00:23:00 PDT 2005


>>>>> "Ganesh" == Ganesh Sittampalam <ganesh at earth.li> writes:

    Ganesh> On Wed, 5 Oct 2005, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

    >> Type-checking is all very nice, but IMO it would be more useful
    >> to

    Ganesh> Personally I can't think of anything more important than
    Ganesh> correctness checks to make sure darcs can't corrupt your
    Ganesh> repository :-)

Nothing in life is certain.  I want to be able to kibitz.

Mostly what prompted that comment is the fact that we're going to have
to live with frequent exponential behavior for a while, before we get
the better type-checking and maybe efficiency improvements.

    >> Are there any introductory references on these things?

    Ganesh> How introductory? The section GHC manual is reasonably
    Ganesh> useful if you already know Haskell (or perhaps another FP
    Ganesh> language with inductive datatypes).

I don't know Haskell or any of the modern FP languages (except the
ageless Lisp) very well yet.  I wanted to know what GADTs are "for",
in abstract terms.  Turns out Simon Peyton-Jones et al's paper was
just the thing, a little bit of math, and a little bit of Haskell.

http://research.microsoft.com/Users/simonpj/papers/gadt/index.htm

Thanks to Shae Erisson.

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.




More information about the darcs-devel mailing list