zacgarby

Very good question! Funnily enough, it was indeed a conscious decision to avoid mentioning "inference", because then people might expect that we're doing polymorphism with type variables/or maybe that we're deriving a Hindley-Milner inference system.

We're not doing these things, so we figured it would be safer this way, but absolutely you could call what we're doing "type inference".

That being said, we've got some ideas for a follow-up paper to revisit this and derive something more worthy of being called "inference".

Hi! Author here. Very nice surprise to see this on the front page of HN this morning :) Happy to answer any questions if anybody has any!

this is great! i’ve been thinking about exactly this (though styled after Logseq rather than Obsidian) but not gotten as far as implementing anything.

that being said, the thing i haven’t been able to convince myself of yet is why these are different to just normal (in-line) functions? as in, why should i have to write [[foo]]: would it not be better to have all identifiers automatically linked?

no, but `$ yes "a cat is an animal"` does (if you know how to interpret it)