Re: [Haskell-cafe] All equations must have the same arity - why?

Neil Mitchell wrote:

Hi,

It's nice to write functions in point free style:

f = sort . nub

But sometimes I have to add an extra case, on a certain value:

f [] = [1] f = sort . nub

But now these equations have different arities, and its rejected by Haskell. Why does this not simply desugar to:

f [] = [1] f x = (sort . nub) x

i.e. lift the arities to the longest argument list.

Is there a reason this isn't done?

In addition to the sharing problem, consider f True x = x f False = undefined Because of seq, the second equation is not equivalent to the eta-expanded f False x = undefined x Roman