On Fri, 2009-01-16 at 18:14 -0500, Anton van Straaten wrote:
Niklas Broberg wrote:
I still think existential quantification is a step too far though. :-P
Seriously, existential quantification is a REALLY simple concept, that you would learn week two (or maybe three) in any introductory course on logic. In fact, I would argue that far more people probably know what existential quantification is than that know what a monoid is. :-)
Andrew's core objection here seems reasonable to me. It was this:
{-# LANGUAGE ExistentialQuantification #-} is an absurd name and should be changed to something that, at a minimum, tells you it's something to do with the type system.
But I suspect I part company from Andrew in thinking that something like ExistentiallyQuantifiedTypes would be a perfectly fine alternative.
+1 (Although shouldn't it really be ExistentiallyQuantifiedConstructorTypes or something? If GHC ever actually adds first-class existentials, what is Cabal going to call *that* then?) jcc