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I think the modern practice of displaying types mostly comes from ML.
by mruts 8y ago
I think the modern practice of displaying types mostly comes from ML.
- WorldMaker 8y agoI wouldn't under-estimate the influence of Pascal here. Noted language designer Anders Hejlsberg for instance has a strong Pascal background (Delphi) and type location in C# was supposedly a heavy debate precisely because of that. Typescript benefited from the repercussions/learnings/findings of that debate and decades of C# usage. That said it's probably a "both" situation: ML and Pascal are both clear founders of type descriptions and their both deciding on relatively the same type syntax within just a few years of each other likely a convergent evolution indicator.
- JadeNB 8y ago… which got it, I think, from Milner's exposition; see, for example, p. 351 of https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022000078900144 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022000078... . This notation makes particular sense for function types, where a mathematician would write `f : A → B` even if not thinking type-theoretically.