Or we can use ML (no, not that ML) to find the implementation you probably want (<a href="http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bodik/research/prospector.html">http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bodik/research/prospector.html</a>), for some measure of 'probably'. But, if we're really talking types, shouldn't that be all you need? (Djinn, <a href="http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2005-December/017055.html">http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2005-December/017055.html</a>) <div><div>- Leo  </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Message: 9 Date: Mon, 14 May 2007 10:02:45 -0400 From: Matthias Felleisen <<a href="mailto:matthias@ccs.neu.edu">matthias@ccs.neu.edu</a>> Subject: Re: [plt-scheme] Are new Schemers supposed to be reading         SRFIs? To: Geoffrey S.Knauth <<a href="mailto:geoff@knauth.org">geoff@knauth.org</a>> Cc: mzscheme Mailing List <<a href="mailto:plt-scheme@list.cs.brown.edu">plt-scheme@list.cs.brown.edu</a>> Message-ID: <<a href="mailto:007D0C52-08CE-42F1-A289-D9A650777D1B@ccs.neu.edu">007D0C52-08CE-42F1-A289-D9A650777D1B@ccs.neu.edu</a>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; delsp=yes; format=flowed On May 14, 2007, at 7:02 AM, Geoffrey S. Knauth wrote: > On May 10, 2007, at 15:27, John Clements wrote: >> In some ways, this resembles the problems that doctors have; in >> order to give the best possible advice, they need to keep up with >> all of the most recent findings, while at the same time >> discounting somewhat the more recent & unverified one. >> >> I don't think that CS has yet evolved (or, hitherto, needed to >> evolve) a good channel for this kind of dissemination. > > If there were contracts or machine readable documentation > everywhere, we could ask the computer, "Has anyone written code > that takes types X Y and produces Z?"  A smart network would find > implementations in different languages, rate them, and offer to > help convert them into our favorite language. It turns out that this was my Diploma thesis in 1983. I applied it to ADTs, which were popular at the time. OCAML had something like this in 1996/97. It was based at ENS and served via the Web. I don't know whether they still do. You may want to ask, though I don't think it took off. -- Matthias </blockquote></div>