16 Sep
2008
16 Sep
'08
5:38 p.m.
Mauricio wrote:
Do you think 'read' (actually, 'readsPrec'?) could be made to also read the international convention (ie., read "1,5" would also work besides read "1.5")? I'm happy to finaly use a language where I can use words of my language to name variables, so I wonder if we could also make that step.
The purpose of 'read' is to read haskell notation, not to read locally-sensitive notation. So the right question to ask is "should we change haskell's lexical syntax to support locally-sensitive number notation". IMO, the answer is no. (1,3) would start to mean (13/10) and we'd need another notational rule (whitespace around commas) for numeric tuples. Feels like a painful special case to me. Jules