On Sun, 5 Feb 2006, Lennart Augustsson wrote:
I don't use lists very much. They are not the right data structure for many things.
Certainly, but lists are useful as interim data structure or for initialising complex data structures.
So : is not as common as :: in my code. I checked a small sample of code, about 20000 lines of Haskell. It has about 1000 uses of ':' and 2000 of '::'.
In my opinion all the special syntactic sugar for lists should go away. I don't think lists are special enough to motivate it.
Fine, someone shares my attitude towards the list sugar. Nevertheless, do you mean with 'no sugar for lists' also no infix operator for list construction? I would still like an operator of low precedence for list construction for writing e.g. (1,'a"):(2,'b'):[].
But this is not what Haskell' is about. It's supposed to be some modest extensions to Haskell. Not designing a new perfect language.
Yes, this discussion is definitely beyond Haskell'.