On 28 jun 2007, at 22.02, Greg Meredith wrote:
Thomas,
Thanks for the reply. My thinking was that once you have a polymorphic form, why single out any other? Less moving parts makes for less maintenance, etc.
Ok, sorry if my reply seemed harsh. You are of course right, that having few primitives is better. In Haskell you have two primives: function binding and let-binding. Let bindings are always recursive, thus let x = e in body =/= (\x -> body) e because x also is bound to itself in "e". Since, do-binding is defined in terms of normal lambda-binding, there are no more primitives. / Thomas PS: "let" is treated specially by the type-checker too. The technical term is "let-polymorphism", but I couldn't find any good results, using a quick google search. Hopefully, others will chime in.