Could it possibly be Dijkstra's mid-2000 essay on notation?

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/EWD1300.html

Dijkstra used f.x and a programming language I used in the 80s that was

designed in the 60s used x.f and that worked very nicely with thinking

of record fields as functions.

F# of course has both f x and x |> f, where |> has caught on as $ did not.

On Thu, 2 May 2019 at 01:45, Ben Lippmeier <benl@ouroborus.net> wrote:

> On 10 Apr 2019, at 12:00 am, Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
>
> Everyone knows that parentheses suck for function application.
>
> But I'm looking for a CS paper that argues that function application
> should have its own explicit syntax in a functional programming
> language. I believe, in the paper, that a dot "." was used, but this
> would be analogous to Haskell's "$" function, except that it would be
> made part of the language definition.
>
> I think it came up on this mailing list (where else would I have seen
> it?), and if anyone remembers the name or author I'd be grateful.

Hi Michael, long time..

Check out:

A useful lambda-notation.
Fairouz Kamareddine, Rob Nederpelt.
Theoretical Computer Science 115 (1996) 85-109

They use “item notation”, and argue that maybe function application isn’t what we should be writing to begin with.

Ben.

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