TypeDirectedNameResolution

Type directed name resolution

This publicly editable page is a place to summarise comments on the Haskell Prime proposal for Type Directed Name Resolution (TDNR).

• The TDNR proposal

Straw poll

It's hard to gauge how much people like proposals like this, so let's try the experiment of collecting votes here:

Names of people who would positively like to see TDNR happen (say briefly why)

• Simon PJ (I wrote the proposal)
• Daniel Fischer (I think it would be an improvement to the language. I have not much missed it yet, so I don't feel strongly about it, though.)

Names of people who think that on balance it's a bad idea

• Ganesh Sittampalam (see http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61723 ; I think that having constraints you can't quantify over is a bad idea. However if that is fixable I'd be generally in favour.)

Other comments

• A lot of people have commented that using . for this as well as composition and qualification is going to start getting confusing. One alternative suggestion was -> but this would conflict with case branches and lambda syntax. Similar things like ~> or --> could work too, but look a little uglier.

However, I think a little ugly is preferable to confusing or conflicting with syntax. I think using '.' won't be too confusing (we all separate the composition operator from the functions by a space anyway, don't we?), so I'd go with that. But rater than letting it die over '.'-ambiguity, I'd choose a different notation (would a#f be an option?).Daniel.is.fischer 21:06, 17 November 2009 (UTC)