AntC
Would this pattern matching seem less odd?:
head [x ..] = x length [x, xs@..] = 1 + length xs
No, it seems and is more odd. Why hide the list constructors behind weird notation? Why require syntactic peculiarities and special cases for pattern-matching lists? In particular, what does pattern-matching against "enumFrom x" mean? Oh, it means something different here? Your proposed syntax is very arbitrary and helps to confuse everybody. Haskell has very simple syntactic rules, and I'm sure I'm speaking for most of the Haskell community when I say that we would like to keep it that way. We have access to the two list constructors (:) and [] directly and they are very convenient, so there is no need for weird syntax just to enforce a set of ASCII characters in source code.
Experienced Haskellers need not answer: you've got too used to ( : ) ;-)
Sorry, but this statement is very infantile. Even if meant as a joke, it's at best offensive and at worst insulting. There is good reasoning behind (:) and [], and just because you don't see it there is no reason to imply that experienced Haskell programmers are stubborn. Haskell programmers are about as open-minded as programmers can get. If you want people to take your proposals seriously, you shouldn't offend the very persons who evaluate them. Greets, Ertugrul -- nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex) http://ertes.de/