21 Sep
2008
21 Sep
'08
11 p.m.
On Sun, Sep 21, 2008 at 7:49 PM, wren ng thornton
We inherited our use of spaces for function application from Lisp and friends, so "foo bar baz" looks perfectly natural to functionalists. But to those used to seeing "foo(bar, baz)" the meaning attached to the spaces is alien.
I have to admit, it took me a long time to be able to parse the ML-style function notation in Haskell. I found it the biggest "barrier to entry". I suspect that most of the complaints about line noise stem from this - to beginners Haskell expressions just look like sequences of identifiers with no apparent grammar to "bind" them together. -- Dan