operators <$> and <*> have their precedence so that this (silly example) works without parens:
(,) <$> "foo" <*> "bar"
Most of the time, I find that the function (the first argument) is the largest sub-expression, so I want to put it last. I can do this
import Control.Lens.Lens ((<&>))
"foo" <**> ( "bar" <&> (,) )
but (even ignoring that this pulls in a library with a ton of dependencies) this needs parens, and I find this quite ugly when the closing parenthesis comes at the end of lambda expression that spans several lines.
Hello, what's bad about the dead simple solution? foobar = makeTuple <$> "foo" <*> "bar" where makeTuple = (,) -- bonus: name as documentation But if you insist: (,) <$> "foo" <*> "bar" is the same as (<*> "bar") . (<$> "foo") $ (,). But that would flip the order of the arguments. So maybe flip them back: import Control.Category ( (>>>) ) foobar = (<$> "foo") >>> (<*> "bar") $ (,) Now let's extract new functions: a >>>* b = a >>> (<*> b) ; infixl 4 >>>* a $>>>* b = (<$> a) >>>* b ; infixl 4 $>>>* foobar = "foo" $>>>* "bar" >>>* "baz" $ (,,) You might want to bike-shed these names a bit, but that sounds like the operators you want. Maybe name them (>$) and (>*)? Side note: sometimes if the function is very short I feel like using such extra operators for "infix" applicatives as well: comma = "foo" <*< (,) >*> "bar" -- same as(,) <$> "foo" <*> "bar" But I'm still not sure if that's a good idea. I've been bitten multiple times because of my own invented operators. What was (>>?!) again? Or (^>>>&)? The more I use Haskell the more I tend to solutions like that first dead-simple one. Cheers, MarLinn