Actually, one of the main reasons that we chose (:) is that that's what Miranda used. So, at the time at least, it was not entirely clear what the "de facto universal inter-language standard" was. In any case, I agree with Stefan regarding Haskell Prime! -Paul Stefan Holdermans wrote:
Brian wrote:
I think the mystery surrounding :: and : might have been that originally people thought type annotations would hardly ever be needed whereas list cons is often needed, but now that it is regarded as good practice to put a type annotation before every top level value binding, and as the type system becomes more and more complex (eg with GADTs etc), type annotations are now presumably far more common than list cons so it would be good if Haskell Prime would swap these operators back to their de facto universal inter-language standard of list cons and type annotation respectively.
I don't think Haskell Prime should be about changing the look and feel of the language.
Regards,
Stefan