[m-dev.] for review: tuples [1]

[Fergus Henderson]

On 02-Aug-2000, Ralph Becket <rbeck at microsoft.com> wrote:
> My personal feeling is that having efficient, working tuples is of higher
> priority than list-style decomposable tuples.

Well, personally, I want to have my cake and eat it too: I would like
efficient working tuples AND in addition I want to be able to write
instance declarations that will handle tuples of arbitrary arity.

Only then will tuples genuinely give you something more useful than
single-constructor types (which give you efficiency, but not syntactic
convenience or predefined typeclass instances) or nested pair types
(which can give you syntactic convenience and predefined typeclass
instances, but not efficiency).

I think this is something that we can reasonably hope to achieve
without too much difficulty.  More on this in an upcoming message!

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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