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I think I could devise a language where “lifetimes” are syntactically correct by construction—but the explicitness of plumbing values could be an unacceptable “annotation burden”. In Kitten I’m doing a similar thing to Rust, where a type is inherently [non–]copyable/droppable.
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I'd be interested in your thoughts about that to better understand the design space, even if it's not a clear/immediate improvement. :)
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Trouble is I'm not just interested in regions and linearity/uniqueness. I also want control over the execution phase, erasure, parametericity. But it might all end up being a mess. Also dependent types are hard.
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Interesting thought. Transporting the concepts across naively, in Rust lifetime subtyping might correspond to cumulativity, and lifetime polymorphism to, well, universe polymorphism. But then what is shifting (and what is it useful for)?
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even the "size" nomenclature feels like a not-transparently-intuitive inheritance to me (possibly they're called levels because it feels more natural to number them than sizes?)
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