What I’m wondering here, is how many rules would go away if instead of giving up on unification altogether, we stuck to local type inference? That would eliminate fewer rules for sure, but how few exactly?
There’s also the question of where the bloat comes from exactly: is it from unification alone, or is it from how unification interacts with everything else? If it’s the latter, then keeping “everything else” small could very well help us keeping a small type system. Personally I wouldn’t ask for much: basic built-in types, sum & product types, a built in array if singly linked lists aren’t enough… and not much else to be honest. Type classes maybe, existential quantification perhaps, and I’d skip inheritance for sure.
What I’m wondering here, is how many rules would go away if instead of giving up on unification altogether, we stuck to local type inference? That would eliminate fewer rules for sure, but how few exactly?
There’s also the question of where the bloat comes from exactly: is it from unification alone, or is it from how unification interacts with everything else? If it’s the latter, then keeping “everything else” small could very well help us keeping a small type system. Personally I wouldn’t ask for much: basic built-in types, sum & product types, a built in array if singly linked lists aren’t enough… and not much else to be honest. Type classes maybe, existential quantification perhaps, and I’d skip inheritance for sure.
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