| ▲ | aw1621107 6 days ago | |
Woah! Thank you for taking the time to explain your perspective and thoughts! It's a lot of food for thought. I wish I had the background and knowledge to discuss things on equal footing :( Just a few additional questions/comments: > Specifically, Haskell, the language as defined, achieves ad-hoc polymorphism by passing a dictionary parameter to functions using overloaded function names. This is done using the standard terms in Haskell and has a clear denotaional semantics for such terms. Rust usage of traits is talked about and reasoned about as a more primitive part of the language, not just a pretty piece of sugar with a more basic existence in the formally defined core of a programming language. Would it be accurate to say that Swift's non-monomorphized generics are more along the lines of the Haskell approach you prefer (i.e., single function implementation with a separate parameter for additional type info)? And a bit more hand-wavey, but IIRC Rust's generics were defined in such a way that monomorphization is technically an implementation detail; in other words, I want to say a Haskell-like approach isn't strictly ruled out. I'd take that with a large grain of salt, though. > If ad-hoc polymorphism is something a language designer wants to incorporate into the usage of a language, my position is that defining a typeclass style sugar over a clearly defined set of terms in the core, formally defined language would be at least a method of prohibiting issues with the resolution, definition, and various methods of implementation of ad-hoc polymorphism polluting the syntax and semantics of the language itself. But the above requires a firm definitional boundary between what is the language and what is syntactic sugar to be built into the definition of the language and built into the compiler infrastructure. Might MiniRust [0] be something along the lines of what you would desire? It seems to fit the general idea of a smaller formally-specified "core" language. There's also this bit about traits specificlaly from the readme: > That translation [from Rust to MiniRust] does a lot of work; for example, traits and pattern matching are basically gone on the level of MiniRust. | ||