Re: [Haskell-cafe] historical question about Haskell and Haskell Curry

On 19 Jul 2007, at 03:40, Tim Chevalier wrote:

On 7/18/07, Michael Vanier wrote:

...

We always say that Haskell is named for Haskell Curry because his work provided the logical/computational foundations for the language. How exactly is this the case? Specifically, does anyone claim that Curry's combinatorial logic is more relevant to the theoretical foundations of Haskell than e.g. Church's lambda calculus? If not, why isn't Haskell called "Alonzo"? ;-)

I'd guess it's because Haskell is a language that provides type inference, and Curry's logic is implicitly typed, whereas Church's typed lambda calculus is typed explicitly. (Why no Haskell compilers' intermediate languages are named "Alonzo" is left as an exercise for the reader :-)

On the hand, Marcin Benke's compiler for the Agda 2 dependently typed programming language is called Alonzo. But it uses an intermediate language named after Curry... Dependent type systems rely on having a bit more type information around (although not usually on a lambda, if you set things up well), so the connection with Church is perhaps more appropriate. Cheers Conor