> There's something to gain by adding functions as first-class objects, but I don't think rethinking it from functional foundations would help. So what other a

> There's something to gain by adding functions as first-class objects, but I don't think rethinking it from functional foundations would help. So what other approach to designing a declarative language do you want to take? I propose total functional language because it's extremely simple and systematic approach. You add your primitive types, primitive functions, primitive type operators (like algebraic types) and voila - you are pretty much set. That way, you get lot of reusability which would be hard to do in an adhoc designed declarative language. And a very uniform syntax as a nice bonus. My question is not rhetorical. Building declarative languages based on typed lambda calculus is very well understood.