Reflections on complexity of ML type reconstruction

This is a collection of some more or less chaotic remarks on the ML type system, definitely not sufficient to fill a research paper of reasonable quality, but perhaps interesting enough to be written down as a note. At the beginning the idea was to investigate the complexity of type reconstruction and typability in bounded order fragments of ML. Unexpectedly the problem turned out to be hard, and finally I obtained only partial results. I do not feel like spending more time on this topic, so the text is not polished, the proofs — if included at all — are only sketched and of rather poor mathematical quality. I believe however, that some remarks, especially those of “philosophical” nature, shed some light on the ML type system and may be of some value to the reader interested especially in the interaction between theory and practice of ML type reconstruction.