On 04/02/06, Brian Hulley
Stefan Holdermans wrote:
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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.
Perhaps it is just a matter of aesthetics about :: and :, but I really feel these symbols have a de-facto meaning that should have been respected and that Haskell Prime would be a chance to correct this error. However no doubt I'm alone in this view so fair enough - it's just syntax after all and I can run my own programs through a pre-processor if I want them the other way round... :-)
Regards, Brian.
In Haskell, they have a de-facto meaning which is opposite to the one you're talking about :) Besides, lots of papers and various other programming languages use Haskell's convention (which was taken from Miranda). - Cale