On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 08:00:36AM -0800, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
I am new to the language (coming from ML) and I am sorry if my first post turns out to be a flamebait, but I can't help it:
Why in the world did the designers of Haskell permit the ' character to be both a prime (part of identifiers) and the single-character quote? Didn't they realize what they were doing to would-be intelligent editors? Or were they just a bunch of rabid ed users?
Has anyone found a way to deal with this in Emacs, _correctly_? That is, among other things, '(' should be ignored for sexp parsing...
I'm just back from a party so I may be, eh, a little bit drunk ;-) but I really don't see the problem. An identifier in Haskell cannot begin with a ' so if a "could-be-identifier" ;-) starts with a ' it is a character constant. It is completely parallel to digits AFAICS: An identifier may contain digits, but it cannot begin with one. So a "could-be-identifier" beginning with a digit is a number. Remi -- See the light and feel my warm desire, Run through your veins like the evening sun It will live but no eyes will see it, I'll bless your name before I die. Key fingerprint = CC90 A1BA CF6D 891C 5B88 C543 6C5F C469 8F20 70F4