Re: [Haskell-cafe] Prolog-style list syntax?

On Jun 28, 2021, at 11:15 AM, Viktor Dukhovni wrote:

On Mon, Jun 28, 2021 at 11:04:46AM -0700, Jeff Clites via Haskell-Cafe wrote:

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how so? `x : y : z : zs`

I don’t mind the existing either, but it would be interesting if this worked:

[x, y, z] ++ zs = list

It is far from clear why this or any similar pattern would be more ergonomic than:

x : y : z : zs

The thread started with:

One of the annoying (to me) inconsistencies with Haskell syntax is that `[ ]` means 'here comes a list'; but for the most common way to write a list, you can't use `[ ]`:

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elem x [] = False elem x ( y: ys ) = ...

I sympathize with that observation, that there’s a special syntax for constructing lists, but you can’t use a similar syntax for the most common pattern-matching case (you can only use it for matching all elements of the list), and the special syntax is a nice visual signal that you are working with lists. It’s not that x : y : z : zs is bad, it’s just not as distinctive. Someone thought it was worth inventing [a, b, c] even though you could just have written a : b : c : Nil, so similar motivations apply. Something like this might work: [x, y, z, zs*] = list But I actually like this the best: [x, y, z, zs...] = list (The overlap with existing range syntax might actually be beneficial.) Jeff