| > ...which would be very useful, but would probably have unpleasant | > consequences for type inference... | | To my mind, this is not a credible objection. The horse has | already bolted; there's no point in trying to shut the stable | door. The existing post-Hindley-Milner aspects of Haskell's | type system are too useful for type inference to be worthy of | such veneration. I agree with this. The goal of 100% type inference is a red herring. This point of view is articulated at some length in a draft paper Mark Shields and I have written, on scoped type variables http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/scoped-tyvars Type inference is still terrifically useful to "fill in the gaps" between programmer-supplied type signatures. The trouble with full type lambdas is that they make unification essentially impossible, and that has a huge impact on how many type annotations you need. So I'm completely in agreement with moving towards allowing the programmer to supply more explicit type information; but I have not yet seen a proposal that supports anything like full type lambdas in a system that looks anything like an extension of Haskell, and that does not require quite burdensome type annotations. But I may well simply be ignorant. Simon