[Haskell-cafe] Re: Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt

Andrew Coppin wrote:

Ertugrul Soeylemez wrote:

...

Andrew Coppin wrote:

...

I would suggest that ExistentiallyQuantifiedTypeVariables would be an improvement [...]

That must be a joke. Typing the long extension names in LANGUAGE pragmas over and over again is tiring and annoying enough already. We really don't need even longer names, and your "improvement" fills up almost half of the width of an 80 characters terminal.

Which is why I personally prefer HiddenTypeVariables. (This has the advantage of using only pronouncible English words, which means you can use it when speaking out loud.)

But, as I say, nobody is going to rename anything, so it's moot.

Well, yes, unfortunately, unless someone proposes extension renamings together with a long paper about the psychological implications and advantages of using shorter names.

...

I can't await the next Haskell standard, where at last all those extensions are builtin.

This frightens me.

At the moment, I understand how Haskell 98 works. There are lots of extensions out there, but I don't have to care about that because I don't use them. If I read somebody else's code and it contains a LANGUAGE pragma, I can immediately tell that the code won't be comprehendable, so I don't need to waste time trying to read it. But once Haskell' becomes standard, none of this holds any more. Haskell' code will use obscure lanuage features without warning, and unless I somehow learn every extension in the set, I'll never be able to read Haskell again! (One presumes that they won't add any extensions which actually *break* backwards compatibility, so hopefully I can still pretend these troublesome extensions don't exist when writing my own code...)

I think, the list of accepted extensions is well chosen. And don't worry, the extensions I'm talking about mainly, are easy to comprehend and very useful, for example multi-parameter type classes and rank-n types. Greets, Ertugrul. -- nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex) http://blog.ertes.de/