[PRL] first-class polymorphic values

[Dave Herman]

Sam answered my question pretty well in this thread. I'm curious about 
whether there are opportunities for unintended type variable capture 
when you have a sufficiently sophisticated type language, in particular 
with polymorphic type application and free type variables.

Dave

Paul A. Steckler wrote:
>> On 2/25/07, Dave Herman <dherman at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>>> I know that FX supported first-class polymorphic values, 
>> and O'Toole 
>>> and Gifford have a PLDI'89 paper on supporting type inference in 
>>> languages with polymorphic values. Does anyone know of 
>> other languages 
>>> that have allowed first-class polymorphic values?
> 
> Haskell (read: GHC) has so-called rank-2 and rank-N polymorphism.
> If you provide a signature, you can pass a polymorphic function 
> to another function.  This feature has been around for some years
> now.  There was a paper at ICFP 2006 by Stephanie Weirich and friends 
> about the "boxy types" used for type inference in the presence of
> higher-rank polymorphism.
> 
> Or did you mean something different by "first-class polymorphic values"?
> 
> -- Paul
>