Well, Kent Petersson and I proposed them as an addition to Haskell in 1994, so they are not that new. :) -- Lennart http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~sheard/papers/silly.pdf On Oct 11, 2006, at 09:47 , Paul Hudak wrote:
Lennart Augustsson wrote:
Well, I think the GADT type definition syntax is the syntax data type definitions should have had from the start. Too bad we didn't realize it 15 years ago. -- Lennart
I agree! In my experience teaching Haskell, the current syntax is a bit confusing for newbies, and for years I've been telling students, "It really means this: ..." and then I write out a syntax more like GADT's.
I also think that if we had adopted this syntax from the beginning, GADT's would have been "discovered" far sooner than now.
-Paul