Are you sure that you can't come up with some nice functions like 'maybe' to replace those view patterns by function calls? Did you really try? I remember the recent discussion on pattern combinators here on Haskell Cafe.
I could, but it would look more ugly - and I want my code to be beautiful :-) For HLint, view-patterns are something I could live without, SYB is something I couldn't live without. SYB makes me GHC only, view-patterns make me GHC 6.10 only. I could port it to GHC 6.8.3, but I don't think its worth the effort, and the complication that would ensue. In general a view-pattern, as used in HLint, can be translated away by: foo (view -> RHS) ... = ... foo new_var ... | RHS <- view new_var = ... But its more ugly, requires more intermediate variables, isn't as clear and isn't a generally correct translation (but I think it would almost always work in HLint). Thanks Neil