On Fri, 12 Oct 2001, Fergus Henderson wrote: [Dave Tweed wrote]
sense. I'm not sure why anymore but Haskell changed the `if clause after the value' to `pattern guard | before =', so I agree it now looks as if it's stating that the pattern guard is equal to the rhs.
I've heard that the company which trademarked "Miranda" also obtained a design patent on using syntax like that in a programming language. The enforcibility of such a design patent is IMHO legally dubious, and the application of design patents to programming languages has never been tested in court as far as I am aware. But nevertheless the mere existence of such a design patent was probably a significant disincentive to using that syntax.
Drifting very quickly offtopic, but this amused me... I think it was probably me that you heard that from (if it was on a post to the main haskell mailing list a couple of years ago.) I was `sure' then that that was the case, having been told independently by two people that was the reason. However, given that no-one from the Haskell comittee corroborated this, and I'd imagine that it isn't something that people would be afraid to admit on the Haskell list (unlike a more fanatical place like /.]), I'm no longer `sure' that the people infrorming me were correct :-) ___cheers,_dave________________________________________________________ www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~tweed/pi.htm |tweed's law: however many computers email: tweed@cs.bris.ac.uk | you have, half your time is spent work tel: (0117) 954-5250 | waiting for compilations to finish.