On 21/11/05, Henning Thielemann
On Sat, 19 Nov 2005, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho wrote:
Ketil Malde wrote: [about A.b and A . b potentially meaning different things:]
Syntax that changes depending on spacing is my number one gripe with the Haskell syntax
I also think that it is problematic that a character which can be part of an alpha-numeric identifier can also be part of an infix operator identifier. This is the cause of the relevance of the spacing. 'A+b' and 'A + b' always mean the same, but 'A.b' and 'A . b' do not. Very confusing.
This really isn't so bad in practice though. I've certainly never been confused by it. You'd have to go out of your way to construct a situation in which it's potentially confusing, which is something that might be relevant in the IOHCC, but not in ordinary programming. There are much more important issues to deal with than this, really. In a sane language, small amounts of whitespace sensitivity are going to be around no matter what you do. We use whitespace to denote function application. I can't write fx to mean f x. This is a good thing. The same perhaps ought to apply to operators. It would be nice sometimes to be able to use '-' as a hyphen in the middle of names. - Cale