[Haskell-cafe] Use of abbreviations in Haskell

2 Jan 2009

      Hi all,

There is currently a discussion on reddit/programming about Haskell.
One complaint is that Haskell functions often use abbreviated names. I
tend to agree with that. In my personal experience it generally takes
more time to learn a third party Haskell library than libraries
written in other languages. I am not sure why but it could be because
of function names. It seems to me that Haskell's current record syntax
enhances this. Take for example the new xml library,

data Element = Element {
  elName :: QName
  elAttribs :: [Attr]
  elContent :: [Content]
  elLine :: Maybe Line
}

data Attr = Attr {
  attrKey :: QName
  attrVal :: String
}

data QName = QName {
  qName :: String
  qURI :: Maybe String
  qPrefix :: Maybe String
}

Personally i would prefer it to be something like

data Element = Element {
  name :: QualifiedName
  attributes :: [Attribute]
  content :: [Content]
  line :: Maybe Line
}

data Attribute = Attribute {
  key :: QualifiedName
  value :: String
}

data QualifiedName = QualifiedName {
  name :: String
  uri :: Maybe String
  prefix :: Maybe String
}

but the global scope of the record field names doesn't allow that and
therefore all kinds of abbreviations are inserted in front of the
record field names which are hard to remember. So a better record
syntax would be welcome. Perhaps the constructor could be used to
limit the scope of the record field name e.g. QualifiedName.prefix?

Regards,
Felix

[Haskell-cafe] Use of abbreviations in Haskell

Felix Martini