On 11/18/05, Sebastian Sylvan
I'm not saying it's impossible to make good use of (.), I'm saying that it's not crucial enough to warrant giving it the dot, which in my opinion is one of the best symbols (and I'd hand it over to record selection any day of the week!). I'm also saying that people tend to abuse the (.) operator when they start out because they think that "less verbose == better", whereas most people, in my experience, tend to stop using (.) for all but the simplest cases (such as "filte (not . null)") after a while to promote readability. I prefer adding a few lines with named sub-expressions to make things clearer.
In case someone counts votes pro et contra of replacing (.) operator, I must say that find it one of the most useful and readable way for doing many different things (not only higher-order). And very compact too. And in my code it is very common operator. While if somebody, who at this moment counts my vote, will remove records from the language some day, I very likely wouldn't notice such a loss. And I can't say I'm very experienced haskell programmer. Actually I'm a beginner comparing my experience with other, particularly imperative OOP languages. And records with (.) as field selector (coupled with dumb constructors) will be the last thing i would miss in haskell.