Re: [Haskell-cafe] In what language...?

On 15/10/2010 09:42 PM, Gregory Collins wrote:

Andrew Coppin writes:

...

Does anybody have any idea which particular dialect of pure math this paper is speaking? (And where I can go read about it...) It's pretty garden-variety programming language/type theory.

Hypothesis: The fact that the average Haskeller thinks that this kind of dense cryptic material is "pretty garden-variety" notation possibly explains why normal people think Haskell is scary.

I can recommend Benjamin Pierce's "Types and Programming Languages" textbook for an introduction to the material: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/

If I were to somehow obtain this book, would it actually make any sense whatsoever? I've read too many maths books which assume you already know truckloads of stuff, and utterly fail to make sense until you do. (Also, being a somewhat famous book, it's presumably extremely expensive...) Type theory doesn't actually interest me, I just wandered what the hell all the notation means.