Martin Percossi wrote:
Hi, I'm wondering what the rationale was for not allowing capitalized variable names (and uncapitalized type names and constructors). I can only think of two arguments, and IMHO both of them are bad:
I'm not so sure about variable names and constructors, but the type syntax just wouldn't work without a lexical distinction between type names and type variables. Is (Int -> Int) supposed to be polymorphic with a type variable named "Int", or is it talking about a type "Int"? Perhaps you'd be happier reserving names beginning with apostrophes for variables? I think case is a bit easier to see - subattentive visual processing, and all that. Mostly, case is used so you know what basic sort of thing some object is, without reviewing everything in scope. Mathematicians use typesetting similarly to tell basic kinds of things appart. Imagine a mathematician complaining that he was forced to learn category theory to get a degree, and people still don't let him use letter with an arrow over it to denote a scalar quantity. It's just that ascii is more restricted, so we don't have things like fonts, greek letters, and accents. Lexical syntax is the least important kind of linguistic freedom. Brandon