On 19 November 2010 22:14, Albert Y. C. Lai
On 10-11-19 04:39 PM, Matthew Steele wrote:
TAPL is also a great book for getting up to speed on type theory:
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/
I am no type theorist, and I nonetheless found it very approachable.
TAPL is surprisingly easy-going. It is long (many pages and many chapters, each chapter short), but it is the good kind of long: long but gradual ramp to get you to the hard stuff. Its first chapter explains convincingly why you should care about types to begin with (summary: a lightweight formal method).
But it is not entirely for Haskell. It covers subtyping, and it doesn't cover type classes.
It is also too bulky to be mobile (because it's long).
IIRC It Does not deal Hindley-Milner type system at all. i.e. it does not cover ML's type system. Its successor ATTAPL :- http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/attapl/index.html Handles an ML like type systems using constraints. AFAICT This area area of type theory's history is not covered properly in any of the sources I have came across. Aaron