Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why is $ right associative instead of leftassociative?

G'day all. Quoting Paul Hudak :

Actually, one of the main reasons that we chose (:) is that that's what Miranda used. So, at the time at least, it was not entirely clear what the "de facto universal inter-language standard" was.

Exactly. One point that's often not appreciated is that Haskell is not a descendent of ML. The ML lineage is, roughly: Lisp -> ISWIM -> ML -> SML, LML, O'Caml etc And the Haskell lineage is: Lisp -> ISWIM -> SASL -> KRC -> Miranda -> Haskell ML is much more like an older cousin than an ancestor. This point is important because Turner languages already had a list syntax at the time that they adopted an ML-like type system. Cheers, Andrew Bromage