On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:10:34 -0700, Anthony Clayden
I'm proposing x.f is _exactly_ f x. That is, the x.f gets desugared at an early phase in compilation.
Anthony, I think part of the concern people are expressing here is that the above would imply the ability to use point-free style. But this orthogonality is disavowed by your exception:
A 'one-sided dot doesn't mean anything.
I haven't read the underlying proposals, so I apologize if the following is covered, but my understanding of the discussion is that the x.f notation is intended to disambiguate f to be a field name of the type of x and therefore be advantageous over "f x" notation where f is presently in the global namespace. With your exception, I still cannot disambiguate the following: data Rec = { foo :: String } foo :: Rec -> String foo = show rs :: [Rec] rs = [ ... ] bar = map foo rs If the exception doesn't exist, then I could write one of the following to clarify my intent: bar = map foo rs baz = map .foo rs -- -KQ