Why? What is your application? In fact, alphanumeric identifiers are used as unary operators. Why? Well, why are binary operators allowed and unary operators not? Isn't that some kind of discrimination? In math, many many operators are unary. Haskell allows creating binary operators. So I would understand
that Haskell supported neither binary nor unary operators, but prefering one above the other just seems odd. Especially when coming from C++ and C#. My application? I'm teaching basic math to beginning video game programmers, and I wanted to demonstrate the logic operators "not, and, or, logical equivalence and implication" etc in Haskell, building them from scratch. Since most programmers have symbol-phobia, I wanted to let them play with the symbols for operators, with Haskell. E.g. \/, /\, --> <--> ==> <==> for or, and, if/then, iff, logical implication, logical equivalence, etc... I cannot do this for the "not" operator, which is a bit annoying, but it's not a show stopper.
You can also use "special syntax" for having unary operators. E.g.
(*) :: () -> a -> a
Nice trick :-)
There has been a long discussion whether the unary minus belongs to number literals or not. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2006-September/017941.html
Yes I read it...
I think that the benefits of prefix or postfix symbolic operators were not worth dispensing with the comfortable section syntax. Well, that's personal I guess, but I would prefer the syntax (? / 100) and (100 / ?), which is just a single extra character to type, and hence allow unary operators, but hey, that's just me, the newbie ;-)
Thanks, Peter