[Haskell-cafe] Re: map (-2) [1..5]

On 2006-09-08, Jón Fairbairn wrote:

"Brian Hulley" writes:

...

In the context of programming, I don't see the problem of just thinking of the integers as a primitive built-in data type which contains some range of positive and negative integers which I'd argue should all be treated on an equal footing when the context of discourse is the integers not the naturals.

I'm not sure what that means. Why should they be equal? Why shouldn't Naturals be more primitive than Integers?

Certainly they're more primitive. Too primitive to have reasonable algebraic properties.

...

I don't think there is a need to force spaces to be put around every infix application. It's only when there would be a conflict with the lexical syntax that spaces are needed, just as at the moment we have (F . G) versus (F.G), (f $ g) versus (f $g) etc.

That rather goes against your simplicity of design argument, doesn't it? Why the special cases? For years I've been rather sloppy about spaces around “$”, and now when I use template haskell, this bites me. At some point in the future someone might decide that & or % is needed to introduce a new chunk of syntax, and formerly valid programmes break. So why not just say that varsym varid is in general reserved for future special syntaxes, and require varsym whitespace varid everywhere?

Hmm. Quite reasonable, actually, if we were designing the language de novo. And easily enough to write correctors for current code. -- Aaron Denney -><-