Re: [Haskell-beginners] [x] and (x:_) for lists -- did you ever think that odd?

Brandon Allbery writes:

You missed experienced Lispers, who are likewise entirely comfortable with cons-like notation.

Good point Brandon, I should have asked what background and expectations people were coming from. From ALGOL, square brackets mean arrays, which are close-ish to lists(?) (For Lispers: does it seem odd using colon? Does it seem odd that dot is function composition, not cons pairing?) I was more getting at the oddness (or perhaps not) of having two different notations.

I would want to very carefully check the implications of your suggestion:

No, I wasn't anywhere near making a "suggestion" or "proposal". Just asking for people's impressions.

it might not integrate well with the rest of pattern matching syntax, ...

FWIW, the double-dot notation is not currently valid in a pattern. I wanted to show something with square brackets. And to my mind, the double- dot could be taken as an unknown-length tail of the list, like an ellipsis. But others (it seems) think of it as enumFrom. AntC