One drastic approach I've used in personal libraries--operator-heavy EDSLs specifically--is to define everything first with alphanumeric names, then put operators in their own modules. In some cases I'd have three such modules: One providing a minimal set of operators that don't clash with anything significant, one providing a larger set of operators that clash with one or more common modules (often deliberately, e.g. duplicating Arrow combinators for some type with similar semantics but no valid Arrow instance), and one providing a bunch of gratuitous Unicode operators that look pretty in my code editor but I don't know how to type in GHCi.
I'm not sure if I've seen that approach anywhere else, however, so it might not be something most people would care for.
- C.
On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 10:45 AM, Stephen Tetley
<stephen.tetley@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Ivan
empty is fine as is, obviously with a Monoid instance as well, people
can choose to use mempty which removes potential name clashes.
I was thinking of (<$>) and (<+>), though I was forgetting that (<+>)
is actually ArrowPlus.
If you are mostly gifting angles as notation to Applicative, maybe a
pretty print library can live with fewer infix ops? Though you could
still define fixities for the binary cases:
infixr 6 `sep1`
Or maybe steal the notation form Vector-Space (^+^) as cases where you
would want both imported at the same time may be uncommon.
Although "trivial" proposals often get rejected for changes to Base, I
suspect a proposal for (<>) as a synonym for `mappend` might have
legs, it would certainly have a lot of support...