On 8/30/07, Andrew Coppin
Obviously you might very well have *meant* to write x = f x. But would it be possible to add some kind of optional compiler warning to find such assignments?
The thing that convinced me to learn Haskell in the first place was the fact that you could write x = f x. Equations where you refer to the same variable on the left and right hand sides are the bread of butter and mathematics, and I was really pleased to find a programming language that let me do the same. So to me the idea of having a warning for this is a bit like putting a sign on bottled water saying "Warning: Contents may be wet". But that's just me. :-) Still, it might be useful to for the compiler to warn when a newly introduced name shadows another one. -- Dan