From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id CAA20168; Fri, 3 May 2002 02:54:35 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id CAA20172 for ; Fri, 3 May 2002 02:54:35 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from relay.pair.com (relay1.pair.com [209.68.1.20]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with SMTP id g430sXX21137 for ; Fri, 3 May 2002 02:54:34 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (qmail 58362 invoked from network); 3 May 2002 00:54:32 -0000 Received: from node-d8e9cca2.powerinter.net (HELO checkerlap.d6.com) (216.233.204.162) by relay1.pair.com with SMTP; 3 May 2002 00:54:32 -0000 X-pair-Authenticated: 216.233.204.162 Message-Id: <4.3.2.7.2.20020502173934.03b73250@mail.d6.com> X-Sender: checker@mail.d6.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 4.3.2 Date: Thu, 02 May 2002 17:49:25 -0700 To: caml-list@inria.fr From: Chris Hecker Subject: [Caml-list] "high end" type theory for working programmers? Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk 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