Re: [Haskell-cafe] Readable Haskell

True, but it might have something to do with the fact that mathematics was invented long before monospaced fonts. And hand-writing integrals, or quantifiers, or the empty-set symbol, is just as easy as writing digits. I would rather agree with Ben: there are lots of places where long identifiers are distracting. Sometimes they make sense, but a lot of times they just don't.

On 20 Sep 2020, at 14:02, Ignat Insarov wrote:

Ben, I think your proposition is righteous and uncontestable in theory, and I stand by you. Unfortunately the practice hardly aligns with the sermon.

No one writes Mathematics in monospace ASCII left to right. They go to great lengths to actually type set things, generously use large and small font, bold and cursive, write above and below the line, use Greek and Hebrew and a myriad infix symbols. And for a reason — compare a latex source of a _«notation heavy»_ paper with it rendered.

One may approach mathematical style in program source with generous use of Unicode, but few dare. Even type setting code in proportional font is considered heresy by many — just so that they may banish proper tabulation and _indent with spaces_. So, even the proponents of the mathematical style do not care to follow it as soon as it requires a little effort. _(Hoω h∀rd may it be to g∃t some ∪nic⊕de on one's kεyb∅arδ? See also the packages `base-unicode-symbols`[1] and `containers-unicode-symbols`[2].)_ Therefore I think for many it is merely an excuse for writing ugly code.

The Darcs code you show illustrates the point Chris Done speaks for as well. Observe top level names: `displayPatch`, `commuteConflicting`, `cleanMerge` — quite German! Then there is `ctxAddInvFL` and `mapFL_FL`, but that from other modules. Finally, I tried to find out what `Prim` stands for — I went as far as to the index of `darcs` on Hackage[3] but no luck. And `prim` is the most frequent in the list of words of the module, with 125 occurrences in normalized case. Primitive? Primary? Prime? Primavera?

[1]: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-unicode-symbols [2]: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/containers-unicode-symbols [3]: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/darcs-2.16.2/docs/doc-index-P.html _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to: http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.