On 28/01/06, Lennart Augustsson
Remove the type signature for b and you will see the loss of sharing.
Nope, still not seeing it with either profiling or Debug.Trace. Also -- the type signature I gave was polymorphic, so what's the deal? If adding a polymorphic type signature fixes the problem, and a polymorphic type signature can be inferred, why not simply treat the source as if one had been written there?
It mostly hurts people like John Hughes that don't have the energy to put in type signatures. ;)
Well, sure. I don't think that we should see exponential blowup in complexity of some programs by leaving out type signatures (though if it was only in sufficiently rare cases, I could put up with it).
On the subject of type signatures, I don't want to make them mandatory, but I think they should be strongly encouraged. I don't buy the argument that they make refactoring programs that much harder. It's still very easy to do, the type checker will tell you exactly where. :)
Me too. It's nice to be able to write quick programs where you leave out the type signatures, but including them is always good for real code. I also think that type signatures (and the type system in general), makes it much easier to refactor code and work on code with which you're unfamiliar. - Cale