Hello,

perhaps it is time to come up with some sort of decision here.  Based on the replies to this thread we seem to have the following opinions:
  1. Eric and Richard seem to be quite keen on the feature
  2. Simon is on the fence, but likes it because it introduces System F vocabulary to Haskell
  3. I am skeptical of the proposal as is, as I think it adds additional complexity to the language (more non-orthogonal features) without significant payoff.

Does anyone else have anything else to add?

-Iavor



On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 6:48 PM Eric Seidel <eric@seidel.io> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 26, 2019, at 13:17, Iavor Diatchki wrote:
> My concern is that the notation certainly suggests that you are binding
> types with the @ syntax, but in really it is still the type signature
> that guides the binding of the variables and the @ parameters just
> duplicate the information from the type signature.

But you are binding types with the @ syntax. The proposal gives a number of examples where the @-bound type variable is bound by a different name (or not at all) in the type signature. Many are contrived, to demonstrate where the binders are allowed, but the higher-rank and proxy-eliding examples look compelling to me.

We also already allow repeated value binders in Haskell. When I write a function in equational style, I have to rebind each argument in each alternate equation. Sometimes this is noisy and I'll prefer a single equation with an explicit `case`. But for functions where the body is sizable, I find the repeated binders to be quite helpful because the scopes are smaller. I can easily see the same benefit applying to type binders. Ultimately, I think this comes down to a matter of style, and I favor letting Haskell programmers pick the style that works best for them.

Eric
_______________________________________________
ghc-steering-committee mailing list
ghc-steering-committee@haskell.org
https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-steering-committee