Bulat Ziganshin
Hello Neil,
Tuesday, July 21, 2009, 1:26:55 PM, you wrote:
++ [ "-i" | not (null (ghcOptSearchPath opts)) ] ++ [ "-i", dir | dir <- ghcOptSearchPath opts ]
Following the discussions, I now support this extension too - I keep seeing more and more places in my code where it would be very useful.
++ [ "-i" | not (null (ghcOptSearchPath opts)) ] ++ concat [ ["-i", dir] | dir <- ghcOptSearchPath opts ]
That looks good enough to convince me that new syntax gains too little here. When adding stuff to the syntax you have to be very careful about interactions between forms, and possible errors. The more you add, the more likely it is that something horrible gets overlooked. And learning haskell becomes more tedious (you have to learn stuff that you'd never use because other people will). Having a fairly small amount of flexible syntax (and Haskell is already pushing the boundaries of "fairly small") together with powerful abstraction tools is far better than having a syntax so huge that no-one can see how weak the abstractions are... I keep trying, but I don't think I can finish this posting without mentioning Perl, whose aficionados have so much investment in having learned all that crap that they can't see how awful it is. -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk