[MLton] ML Workshop, sML Evolution, and CUFP trip report

[Andreas Rossberg]

Vesa Karvonen wrote:
> 
> Interesting.  Could you (or someone else) summarize the reasons Dave MacQueen
> gave for not wanting type classes?

As far as I understood, he dislikes the idea of things being passed 
around implicitly, like the "dictionaries" associated with type class 
constraints (which in an ML approach probably would be structures). He 
considers it a virtue of ML, and part of its simplicity, that no such 
hidden magic exists, nor is it to be missed.

Others expressed the view that this was simply a mode of using modules, 
enabled by extending the power of type inference slightly, in a useful 
direction.

- Andreas