Re: [Haskell-cafe] map (-2) [1..5]

On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 09:17:39PM +0100, David House wrote:

On 17/08/06, Brian Hulley wrote:

...

Literal highlighting in the editor would make it clear that x-2 === x (-2). I think a basic issue is that at the moment it is strange that non-negative numbers can be specified as literals but negative numbers can't - they can only get in through the "back door" of evaluation - which just doesn't seem right.

You also can't specify string literals: they're sugar for 'a':'b':'c':[]. You seem to be arguing that syntactic sugar, and by extension, a small core language, is bad.

No, I think he is saying this particular piece of syntactic sugar is more like syntactic castor oil. Also, the main reason it needed to be "special" was not for terms, but for n+k patterns, where you couldn't use 'negate' and have it parse properly. but n+k patterns are likely to be dropped anyway so we might as well do away with this subwart too. John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈