Lennart Augustsson wrote:
I now think :: for type signatures was a bad mistake. I don't use lists very much. They are not the right data structure for many things. So : is not as common as :: in my code. I checked a small sample of code, about 20000 lines of Haskell. It has about 1000 uses of ':' and 2000 of '::'.
Just for interest, I analysed some of my code. Obviously my style is quite different to yours--my type specialiser of 3,500 lines has 240 conses, and only 22 occurrences of '::'. I seem to be using '::' a bit more lately, though, which I suspect is due to using classes much more. I also checked the Agda source code, about 14,000 lines, with about 500 occurrences of cons and 640 of '::'. I think the only conclusion one can draw is that style varies.
In my opinion all the special syntactic sugar for lists should go away. I don't think lists are special enough to motivate it.
What, no list comprehensions?? I'd disagree--sequencing is special, and lists represent it directly. Don't forget, also, that lists are also much more prevalent in beginners' code--and nice notation for beginners helps get people started on Haskell.
But this is not what Haskell' is about. It's supposed to be some modest extensions to Haskell. Not designing a new perfect language.
Right! John