On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 11:59 AM, Tillmann Rendel <rendel@informatik.uni-marburg.de> wrote:

Paul R wrote:

I am curious what are interesting use-cases for that? Symbolic
analysis? self-compilers?

Optimization. For example, imagine the following definition of function composition:

 map f . map g = map (f . g)
 f . g = \x -> f (g x)

In Haskell, we cannot write this, because we cannot pattern match on function calls.

 Tillmann

So, we're not talking about optimization as in Mathematical Programming but optimization in language constructs.