[Caml-list] Higher-order kinds?

[Jacques Carette]

Is there any way to get higher-order kinds in Ocaml?

While investigating some issues around partial evaluation (in
MetaOCaml), we ran across this post from Jacques Guarrigue:

http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2006/09/05dcdcb7064cc73bfdfb756a419a9010.fr.html

After a few emails between Ken Shan and Oleg Kiselyov, Ken produced a very elegant translation of this 'trick' into Haskell, which starts off thus:

data T f = Bool (f Bool) | Int (f Int) | Fun (T (F1 f))
newtype F1 f a = F1 { f1 :: T (F2 f a) }
newtype F2 f a b = F2 { f2 :: f (a -> b) }

Note how f in the above it a type-level function, and the types F1 and
F2 are used 'partially applied'. It is possible to expand this all out
into first-order, but the end result is not pretty, to say the least!

Note that the rest of the Haskell code (classes and instances) can be
translated into Functors and Modules [using that nice trick of having
functors that produce module types, again thanks to Jacques G.]. The
end result is definitely more verbose than the Haskell, but not
desperately so.

Jacques

PS: rest of code, which just implements in an 'open' way what Jacques G.
did using closed types in the email linked-to above

class Dynamic t where
inj :: f t -> T f
prj :: T f -> Maybe (f t)

instance Dynamic Bool where
inj = Bool
prj (Bool x) = Just x
prj _ = Nothing

instance Dynamic Int where
inj = Int
prj (Int x) = Just x
prj _ = Nothing

instance (Dynamic a, Dynamic b) => Dynamic (a -> b) where
inj x = Fun (inj (F1 (inj (F2 x))))
prj (Fun t) = prj t >>= prj . f1 >>= return . f2
prj _ = Nothing

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