On 7/27/06, Doaitse Swierstra
Given the ever increasing complexity of Haskell as understood by the GHC, I think very few people are looking forward to see further complications that do not really add much.
We alreday are at a stage where first year students trying to master haskell get error messages like
"Bool is not an instance of the class Num"
if they accidently write 1 + True (or something equivalent, but less obvious).
I absolutely agree with you, making Haskell easy to understand for newcomers is a far more important goal than an esoteric feature like this. If this cannot be added in a transparent enough way, then it shouldn't be added. But I don't see why it couldn't be. Have you ever been bitten by the rebinding feature provided for the do-notation (without trying to use it that is)? Why should the if-then-else be any harder?
If you want to mess around why not call the function "provided" or something similar.
Not a bad suggestion.
In short: you will not make Haskell a lot more popular by attracting category theorists, but by making transitions from Java and C as smooth and surprise-free as possible (and this is already hard enough).
Agreed. A feature like this should certainly not be by default, but only for advanced users. There should be no surprises.
So I strongly suggest to leave this to the next major redesign of the language.
Well, if you want to redesign the core language, it is always easier to include features that have been tried out in practice. Hen or egg. I am not convinced that this is too complicated a feature to be added to GHC right now -- provided that it can be added in a transparent way. /Niklas