On 7/18/07, Michael Vanier wrote:

We always say that Haskell is named for Haskell Curry because his work provided the logical/computational foundations for the language. How exactly is this the case? Specifically, does anyone claim that Curry's combinatorial logic is more relevant to the theoretical foundations of Haskell than e.g. Church's lambda calculus? If not, why isn't Haskell called "Alonzo"? ;-)

I'd guess it's because Haskell is a language that provides type inference, and Curry's logic is implicitly typed, whereas Church's typed lambda calculus is typed explicitly. (Why no Haskell compilers' intermediate languages are named "Alonzo" is left as an exercise for the reader :-) Cheers, Tim -- Tim Chevalier* catamorphism.org *Often in error, never in doubt "Base eight is just like base ten, really... if you're missing two fingers." -- Tom Lehrer

Michael Vanier writes:

We always say that Haskell is named for Haskell Curry because his work provided the logical/computational foundations for the language. How exactly is this the case? Specifically, does anyone claim that Curry's combinatorial logic is more relevant to the theoretical foundations of Haskell than e.g. Church's lambda calculus?

At the time the name was chosen, SK combinators had been one of the main ways of implementing lazy functional languages. Although they had already been supplanted by compilation to more general combinators, some form of combinators were still part of the compilation process, so the connexion with combinatory logic was fresh in our minds.

If not, why isn't Haskell called "Alonzo"? ;-)

I think that was one of the suggestions made among many others. Haskell has the advantage of sounding less like a person's name (which might have been why Curry didn't like it). -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk