Re: [Haskell-cafe] Looking for a paper

On 10 Apr 2019, at 12:00 am, Michael Orlitzky wrote:

Everyone knows that parentheses suck for function application.

But I'm looking for a CS paper that argues that function application should have its own explicit syntax in a functional programming language. I believe, in the paper, that a dot "." was used, but this would be analogous to Haskell's "$" function, except that it would be made part of the language definition.

I think it came up on this mailing list (where else would I have seen it?), and if anyone remembers the name or author I'd be grateful.

Hi Michael, long time.. Check out: A useful lambda-notation. Fairouz Kamareddine, Rob Nederpelt. Theoretical Computer Science 115 (1996) 85-109 They use “item notation”, and argue that maybe function application isn’t what we should be writing to begin with. Ben.