I don't even want this feature. :-) The point being that datatype declarations, *as such*, are explicit anyhow. Why bother about the explicit quantifiers then? Of course, in a language with inferred datatypes I would mind. That's an interesting question! I also wouldn't (yet?!) support this feature request because we will still confuse beginners, but that's just my feeling. Ralf

-----Original Message----- From: Stefan Holdermans [mailto:stefan@cs.uu.nl] Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2005 11:48 PM To: Ralf Lammel Cc: haskell-cafe@haskell.org; Benjamin Franksen Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] pros and cons of static typing andside effects ?

Ralf,

...

Technically this is trivial it seems. I think that some people consider this proposal a problem because typos (misspelled type parameters) immediately lead to the accidental exploration of a more advanced type-system feature and correspondingly more involved error messages. Of course, the type checker could perhaps consider adding "Did you really mean to ...?".

Well, okay, but as soon as the type checker starts to asking these questions, I would immediately start adding the explicit quantifiers, just to get rid of those annoying warning messages. ;) So one would we also need to be able to control the behaviour of the type checker with respect to these warnings by means of a compiler flag like "fno-warn-on-implicit-existential-quantification". All of this is, of course, still trivial. :)

Have we thought about it enough to make it a feature request?

Regards,

Stefan