G'day all.
Quoting Tomasz Zielonka
Probably it was anticipated that right associative version will be more useful. You can use it to create a chain of transformations, similar to a chain of composed functions:
(f . g . h) x = f $ g $ h $ x
Of course, if $ were left-associative, it would be no less useful here, because you could express this chain thusly: f . g . h $ x This is the way that I normally express it. Partly because I find function application FAR more natural than right-associative application, and partly because I'm hedging my bets for Haskell 2 just in case the standards committee wakes up and notices that the associativity of $ is just plain wrong and decides to fix it. :-) In fact, I'll go out on a limb and claim that ALL such uses of $ are better expressed with composition. Anyone care to come up with a counter-example?
But of course, left associative version can also be useful. Some time ago I used a left associative version of the strict application operator, which I named (!$).
In fact, I think it's much MORE useful, and for precisely the reason that you state: it makes strict application much more natural. Strict application also has the wrong associativity. As it is, $! is only useful if the _last_ argument of a function needs to be strict. I find that ordering my arguments in a de Bruijn-like order (which many experienced functional programmers do unconsciously) results in this being the least common case. The last argument of a function is usually the induction argument: it's almost invariably the subject of a top-level test. The strictness analyser invariably picks up that the argument is strict. It's the OTHER arguments you may need to evaluate early. Suppose you have a function with three arguments, the second of which needs to be strict. I want to write something like this: f (g x) $! (h y) $ (j z) What I have to write is this: (f (g x) $! (h y)) (j z) or this: let y' = h y in y' `seq` f (g x) y' (j z)
Anyway, you can't always remove all parentheses. And why would you want to? Everybody is used to them.
I agree. However, sometimes parentheses make things more confusing. Almost always the best solution is to give the offending subexpression a name, using "let" or "where". However, the specific case above is the only one that I've found where this, too, makes things worse. In summary: There is no good reason to make $ right-associative and at least one good reason to make it left-associative. Cheers, Andrew Bromage