In what sense is Haskell's type system any more ad-hoc than ML's?
According to Mark P Jones, the author of "Typing Haskell in Haskell":
Haskell benefits from a sophisticated type system, but implementors, programmers, and researchers suffer because it has no formal description.http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/thih/
Haskell's type system was designed to make programming delightful. I vastly prefer it to some of the contortions of ML's type system, such as the separate + and +. operators. But by functional programming standards, I think that any type system without an official description can be fairly described as ad hoc.
According to Mark P Jones, the author of "Typing Haskell in Haskell":
Haskell benefits from a sophisticated type system, but implementors, programmers, and researchers suffer because it has no formal description. http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/thih/
Haskell's type system was designed to make programming delightful. I vastly prefer it to some of the contortions of ML's type system, such as the separate + and +. operators. But by functional programming standards, I think that any type system without an official description can be fairly described as ad hoc.