Re: [Haskell-cafe] Parse text difficulty

Robert Dockins writes:

...

Prelude> [1..5] `zipWith (+)` [7..] <interactive>:1: parse error on input `('

is there a technical reason for this or did it just happen?

If you are asking why general expressions are prohibited between backticks, yes, there is a reason. The expression could be arbitrarily large, so you might have to search many lines to find the closing backtick. But in such a situation, it is surely much more likely that the programmer has simply forgotten to close the ticks around a simple identifier. Just think of the potential for delightfully baffling type error messages that might result! Regards, Malcolm