
12 Oct
2009
12 Oct
'09
2:09 p.m.
Joe,
On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Joe Fredette
wrote: I completely forgot about free theorems! Do you have some links to resources -- I tried learning about them a while ago, but couldn't get a grasp on them... Thanks.
There is Wadler's paper but I do find it tricky: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.38.9875 You can play with the generator here: http://linux.tcs.inf.tu-dresden.de/~voigt/ft/ The results can look unreadable at first, but I find that if I copy them onto paper and do all of the remaining substitutions manually (like I had to do with (a,b) -> (b,a)) you end up with something readable. If you keep doing this you'll get a good intuition for what the free theorem for a type will look like. -- Dan