I'm looking on bemused as the Visible `forall` aka RequiredTypeArguments proposal goes through GHC Committee discussion. I sympathise with Simon M's alarm at the namespacing effects needed. SPJ's attempt at softening the blow: https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-steering-committee/2021-June/002463.h...
Like Simon [M], I'm sad that I have to write
f (List Int) or f (type [Int]) but I think the alternative (of requiring the reader to know
the type of the function in order to resolve the binding of names
in its argument) is much, much worse.
If a `type` herald is supposed to emolliate me, I have Hugs accepting this: Hugs> sizeOf (:: Int) 4 Hugs> typeOf (:: [Int]) TypeRep 3 ... * `(:: t)` -- the parens are required -- is a lot less cluttered than Proxy; * It's a little less cluttered than the proposed `type`; * More importantly, it heralds much better to my eye 'here comes a type'. I'm curious why so much of the proposal uses the `sizeOf` example. Its type currently is `Sized a => a -> Int`. It seems to me quite useful I can supply a term as argument -- I might well have in scope a (term) var of the required type. I haven't needed to change the type of `sizeOf` for the Hugs heralded syntax. The syntax is sugar for `(termType :: Int)`, in which `termType` is in effect the same as `undefined`, but with a name more revealing for diagnostics. Whereas the proposal won't actually help with `sizeOf`, until/unless the library changes its signature -- thereby breaking a load of code and dependencies. Or introduce a different-named function? The other Motivation from the proposal is to fix an inconsistency with DataKinds. It seems to me there's another way to fix such an inconsistency: change the design for DataKinds -- which to me has always been a bit of a kludge. There's also some interaction in the ugliness with `ScopedTypeVariables` -- which, with the benefit of hindsight, is increasingly getting regarded as a mis-feature. Hugs has always had the `PatternSignatures` feature, and indeed `FunctionSignatures`. It seems to me that erasure/pi-types is an implementation detail that should be kept out of the surface syntax. If the programmer wants to signal that it's the type of a term that's of concern (such that the term can be erased as well as -- ultimately -- its type), annotate the terms' position in the signature (something like with strictness), rather than banjaxing familiar syntax. Behind the scenes translate to a pi-types implementation. AntC