P. R. Stanley wrote:
You know, as soon as I posted the message I remembered the destructive assignment thingummy. the following is what I was talking about: Prelude> 13:[1, 2] [13, 1, 2] which I don't believe has an address in the memory, correct?
No. It does have a well-defined address in memory, which is there as long as you need it (and then garbage-collected away sometime thereafter).
Back to the comma, surely, syntax sugar fulfills the role of an operator, a function, or a sequence of low-level procedures, either in part or comprehensively.
The ":" is actually a constructor, which is a function that is fully evaluated at compile time and on which you can do pattern matching. The list syntax also forms such a pattern.
In C, for example, iteration could be implemented using the if construct with the dreaded goto command. So, strictly speaking, the while loop could be classed as syntax sugar. Yet, the while loop is a well-recognized construct in its own right. I hope you can see what I'm driving at.
Syntactic sugar is fully desugared at compile time. A while loop with constant limits *could* be considered syntactic sugar if the compiler can statically unroll the loop. Variable limits are definitely beyond this definition, since they can only be evaluated at runtime. Dan Weston