From: "Tillmann Rendel"
However, I don't see why it would be a good idea. The obvious disadvantage is making the syntax more complicated, and more fragile. For example, you no longer could move an expression inside a brackets while refactoring your code.
Regarding possible advantages: Do you have a specific use case in mind, which could be written easier or cleaner with this list syntax?
I would just like as simple an input syntax as possible (minimum of punctuation) for interactive use, for both lists and tuples. For instance, if all entries in a list or tuple are numbers, then I think eliminating the commas would be convenient and look nicer. As a use case, one might have " permute (2 3 4) [7 9 11 0 1 5]", which would be a function which cyclically permutes elements 2 3 4 of a list. Regarding your question of what [a + b c] in "altered consciousness syntax" would resolve to in real world Haskell, it would be [a, (+), b, c]. [(a + b) c] would resolve to [a + b, c]. The rule would be that whitespace inside a bracket becomes a comma delimiter. If there are parentheses inside the bracket, then the expression inside the parentheses reverts to normal syntax. These are probably not workable ideas. I'm just annoyed by extra punctuation which I consider to be visual clutter.