forall notation: what does the period / dot mean?

Question

What does the period / dot mean?

forall a. Num a => a -> a -> a

Is it merely a separator?

Answer 1

Yes, it's just a syntactic separator. It separates variable declarations from variable usages, just like the -> in a lambda expression. It means "Here endeth the binders". I suppose the language designers went for . because it's 22 characters shorter.