Patrick Surry wrote:
Probably a silly question, but for me one of the nice things about Haskell is that it's a lot like just writing math(s). But in contrast to math you lose a lot of notational flexibility being limited to the ascii character set in your source code.
It would be nice to be able to use a richer set of symbols in your source code for operators and functions (e.g. integral, sum, dot and cross-product, …), as well as variables (the standard upper and lower-case greek for example, along with things like super- and sub-scripting, bold/italic and what-not). You could imagine ending up with source code that reads just like a mathematical paper.
Don't know how I'd actually then write/maintain the source-code - some WYSIWYG editor or effectively writing it in '(la)tex'? Maybe that's what Knuth is on about with his 'literate programming' weave/tangle stuff which I don't know much about - does that translate to Haskell?
Personally, I'd just like to be able to get rid of "->", "\" and other such hacks. Would it be possible to amend GHC so that it accepts "->" and [whatever the Unicode codepoint for "left arrow" is] and treats both the same? IIRC, GHC already accepts Unicode input. I seem to recall some people debating what to do about languages that don't have a concept of "uppercase" and "lowercase" - the Haskell language critically hinges on that distinction. But then, if you wanted to write your Haskell programs in arabic or something, I would think the fact that all the language keywords and every library ever written are in English, so...