Hello,
On Wed 23 Aug, Tim Sweeney wrote:
> Is this "higher order function application" a useful notion,
Eeek!, no IMHO
> and does any research exist on the topic?
I suspect not, though I must admit I'm no expert on what's being researched
in the world.
What scares me about this is that even if it were possible to produce
a compiler which disambiguated such expressions using complex rules, that's
not enough. You (we) as a programmer also need to understand those rules
and apply them to make sure the program you get is what you intended.
I think its much better to stick with the philosopy of writing down exactly
what you mean. Unless your proposal enables functions to be defined which
are currently undefinable in Haskell, I'd say forget it. Sorry :-(
P.S. This is also why I'm not entirely happy with using the type system
to resolve ambiguities caused by overloading. It makes programs harder
to understand IMHO. But people who think this way seem to be in a
minority, so maybe your proposal will get the approval of somebody other
than me :-)
Regards
--
Adrian Hey
