Will Yager
Obviously a change like this would be horribly destructive to existing code, and for relatively little benefit.
Hidden behind a pragma -- is it really that horribly destructive?
There are much larger barriers to understanding Haskell than syntactic trivia like the one mentioned here.
Barriers exist at every level of mastery -- the ones that matter are those present at the exact point of one's progression. It is, of course, true that at some point the little awkwardness exits the picture completely -- but for any point of time, there always will be a nontrivial set of people thinking to themselves -- "what the heck?!".
It is worth asking, then, if we should record these small aesthetic suggestions somewhere for consideration while designing the next major compatibility-breaking release of the Haskell specification (Haskell 2020 or what have you).
Now this is exactly the kind of assessment that I have been hoping to hear! And the idea is that, before the next release of the language specification, it is possible to experiment with the keyword hidden behind the pragma -- and should the result prove satisfactory, all that remains to do is to lift the pragma requirement. Maybe a unified playground for such tweaks -- XNewSyntax, for example. Or do people suggest, that it should somehow suddenly materialise in the next release of the specification, without touching any staging ground? -- respectfully, Косырев Серёга -- “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche