Hi, it’s a worthwhile observation that we (somewhat oddly) use a two-dot ellipsis in ASCII-Haskell, and Artem took this up on Github to ponder if we should allow ASCII ... as well, but I am not convinced. I wrote on the Github thread:
Hmm, I am not sure I agree that it's confusing. At least to me, from the start when I saw Haskell, the ascii .. meant what's \ldots in LaTeX, and what I tend to write as three close-to-each other dots on paper and is semantically an ellipsis, which in Unicode has a codepoint with that names that in most fonts looks like what you expect it to…
So the .. is an ASCII cludge like all others (probably because ... is unnecessarily wide).
The analogue is \ for λ - just because the left leg is missing we wouldn't use a unrelated look-alike like \ for the unicode variant, nor ask to be able to write ,\ in ASCII for a better approximation of the real letter.
TL;DR: no need to change ASCII-Haskell, and let's use the semantically correct ellipsis symbol in Unicode-Haskell.
Vlad, how firm is your -1? If you feel strongly enough about it (which is of course absolutely fine), I’d maybe just put this up for a vote? It’s a mostly aesthetical, superficial change where voting may be more efficient than long discussions. Cheers, Joachim -- Joachim Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de http://www.joachim-breitner.de/