On Thursday 17 November 2005 19:21, Cale Gibbard wrote:
Sebastian Sylvan wrote:
Personally I think that the dot is way to good of a symbol to be "wasted" on function composition. I mean, how often do you really use function composition in a way which doesn't obfuscate your code? I use ($) way more often than (.). Some people do use it more often than I
Function composition is a very important and fundamental operation on functions, and I use it all the time. Haskell is supposed to be a functional language. I'd vote against any motion to make it less convenient. Of course, it really shouldn't be (.) but a small circle centred on the line, which isn't on ordinary keyboards. (°) looks closer, but is much less convenient to type. (I need to type "<Compose> 0 ^" in order to get that character.) Spelling it as (.) really is the best easy-to-type approximation.
Yes, yes, yes. I'd rather use a different operator for record selection. For instance the colon (:). Yes, I know it is the 'cons' operator for a certain concrete data type that implements stacks (so called 'lists'). However I am generally opposed to wasting good operator and function names as well as syntactic sugar of any kind on a /concrete/ data type, and especially not for stacks aka lists. For a hypothetical Haskell2 I'd propose to get rid of all special 'list' constructs and re-use the good symbols and names for /abstract/ interfaces to sequences and collections resp. (in case of the colon) for record selection. Just my 2 cent. Ben