If you have an array of streams then you might well want to convert that to stream of arrays. And indeed one can imagine multiple levels and having functions which take multiple other functions and return a function to operate on such things. I don't know how likely that is to be good programming style, but if anyone wants to think about doing a hypercollections SIP then they should start by looking at Ken Iverson's J language (
jsoftware.com). Iverson invented APL, which wasn't quite right. He then invented J which is perfect in its weird way. [When APL came along I tried and failed to write a one line random bridge hand generator. This is not hard to do in J.]
Here's another biggish project that might interest someone. There is a wonderful thing called Geometric Algebra. In GA all sorts of geometric operations become simpler to do and simpler to think about. It generalizes complex numbers and quaternions (used by 3D programmers) and much more. If you implement GA naively then data structures get big real fast (with lots of redundancy in all practical cases) and the potential for efficient geometrical operations is lost. So it is a research project to implement GA efficiently (e.g. gaigen2, see
http://www.science.uva.nl/ga/software/index.html). What scala can do is implement GA so that the complexity of multiple underlying representations is hidden, and the beauty and efficiency of GA shines through ... And if not then it will be a great challenge for Martin to further perfect this wonderful language :-). [And if anyone wants to do this then I'd love to be involved in a small way.]
Robert Smart
