RE: [Haskell-cafe] Point-free style (Was: Things to avoid)

On 10 February 2005 14:23, Jan-Willem Maessen wrote:
If you're trying to avoid obscurity, why advocate point-free style?
I ask this question to be deliberately provocative; I'm not trying to single you out in particular. So, to everybody: What's so great about point-free style?
I completely agree. I find myself tending towards pointfull-style these days, perhaps because I'm getting lazy and find it easier to read code when lots of things have names. I use explicit function definitions and lambda bindings a lot more than I used to - at some point I figured out that the number of characters in my source code isn't the right target for optimisation :-) I don't think a general "things to avoid" section should be advocating not naming things... in fact I would advocate the reverse. Name as many things as possible, at least until you have a good feel for how much point-freeness is going to result in code that you can read again in 6 months time. Cheers, Simon

On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 15:56 +0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
I don't think a general "things to avoid" section should be advocating not naming things... in fact I would advocate the reverse. Name as many things as possible, at least until you have a good feel for how much point-freeness is going to result in code that you can read again in 6 months time.
Another reason to name more things is that it can make debugging easier, especially in something like buddha where it tells you: name args => result Also, avoiding excessive higher-order code can make debugging easier too. Cheers, Bernie.
participants (2)
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Bernard Pope
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Simon Marlow