Re: Curry

From: Philip Wadler <wadler_at_research.bell-labs.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 10:52:48 -0500

> > Good point, and well worth stressing. Nonetheless, it still seems
> > quite reasonable to say that Curry should contain all Haskell
> > that eschew type classes and non-uniform pattern matching.
>
> I think this is a good remark and I can agree to it.

I'm delighted to hear this.

> Concerning uppercase/lowercase: of course, we can or should
> use Haskell's *convention*, but I do not like to enforce it, ...

Oh dear. I don't think we've gotten our point across.

Yes, there are problems with enforcing a capitalisation convention.
There are also problems with not enforcing one. Nothing unique to
Curry here. The Haskell committee spent a lot of time hashing
over this ground. I strongly urge you to leave this can of worms
shut. Adopt the Haskell solution wherever possible, warts and all!

You might be interested in the following scientific law, which
has been verified by extensive emperical observation.

   WADLER'S LAW OF LANGUAGE DESIGN

   In any language design, the total time spent discussing
   a feature in this list is proportional to two raised to
   the power of its position.

        0. Semantics
        1. Syntax
        2. Lexical syntax
        3. Lexical syntax of comments

   (That is, twice as much time is spent discussing syntax
   than semantics, twice as much time is spent discussing
   lexical syntax than syntax, and twice as much time is
   spent discussing syntax of comments than lexical syntax.)

With the exception of comments, I would say discussion so far
conforms to this observation. -- P
Received on Do Dez 19 1996 - 18:24:26 CET