On 2006-02-04 at 21:15GMT "Brian Hulley" wrote:
Stefan Holdermans wrote:
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Brian wrote:
I think the mystery surrounding :: and : might have been that originally people thought type annotations would hardly ever be needed whereas list cons is often needed, but now that it is regarded as good practice to put a type annotation before every top level value binding, and as the type system becomes more and more complex (eg with GADTs etc), type annotations are now presumably far more common than list cons so it would be good if Haskell Prime would swap these operators back to their de facto universal inter-language standard of list cons and type annotation respectively.
I don't think Haskell Prime should be about changing the look and feel of the language.
Perhaps it is just a matter of aesthetics about :: and :, but I really feel these symbols have a de-facto meaning that should have been respected and that Haskell Prime would be a chance to correct this error. However no doubt I'm alone in this view so fair enough
Not exactly alone; I've felt it was wrong ever since we argued about it for the first version of Haskell. ":" for typing is closer to common mathematical notation. But it's far too late to change it now.
- it's just syntax after all
It is indeed. Jón -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk