Re: [Axiom-developer] Axisp news

[Ralf Hemmecke]

On 06/26/2007 08:07 PM, Stephen Wilson wrote:
> Martin Rubey <address@hidden> writes:
> > Dear Stephen,
> >
> > many thanks for your detailed answer.  I must admit however, that I dislike
> > your idea writing
> >
> >    D(P : Polynomial (R : Ring)) : ... == ...
> >
> > for
> >
> >    D(R : Ring, P : Polynomial R) : ... == ...
> >
> > Isn't this just syntactic sugar?  My feeling (!) is that this will pose more
> > questions than answers.  Enforcing case sensitivity on values, domains and
> > categories also does not look very appealing to me, sorry.
>
> It may be syntactic sugar for the sake of a function definition, but it
> implies a handling of types which diverges from how things are
> currently done.

I must say, no matter whether it is syntactic sugar or not, a definition 
of the form

(*)     D(P : Polynomial (R : Ring)) : ... == ...

would confuse me. How am I supposed to used that? Should I write

D(P) for some polynomial? (Note that Polynomial is a domain so P is an 
element.)

You probably don't mean that. So let's assume that Polynom(R) is a category.

Now suppose I define

define MyPolyCat:Category == Polynom(Integer) with ...
MyPoly: MyPolyCat == add ...

Now can I write

  D MyPoly

??? (Note that it doesn't exactly match your pattern (*).)
Or should I rather write

  D(Integer, MyPoly)

even with just the definition (*)?

I cannot see that I would like such sugar.

Ralf