Brilliant. This made my day. I must admit, I looked briefly at the paper after I saw the link, yawned, and closed it. Then I saw Andrew's comment, skimmed the paper, becoming more and more convinced that it was a joke, saw the last line, and then had to go back and read the whole thing again. Just awesome. On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 3:22 PM, Andrew Coppin wrote:

Miguel Mitrofanov wrote:

...

I think you might be interested in http://www.research.att.com/~bs/whitespace98.pdf

Thankyou. That is the most insane thing I've read all day. And I've been reading a C++ tutorial all day! o_O

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On Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:40:49 -0400, "Andrew Wagner" wrote:

Brilliant. This made my day. I must admit, I looked briefly at the paper after I saw the link, yawned, and closed it. Then I saw Andrew's comment, skimmed the paper, becoming more and more convinced that it was a joke, saw the last line, and then had to go back and read the whole thing again. Just awesome.

You didn't even need to read the last line. On page 6 of that paper:

A preprocessor that implements the facility for any current C++ implementation can be freely downloaded from http://www.research.att.com/~bs/whitespace.html.

Click on that link and tell me what you see. Incidentally, this is just typical Bjarne Stroustrup humor. It reminds me of "An Interview with Bjarne Stroustrup" (see http://www.ariel.com.au/jokes/An_Interview_with_Bjarne_Stroustrup.html). Read that interview and tell me what you think. -- Benjamin L. Russell

Miguel Mitrofanov wrote:

I think you might be interested in http://www.research.att.com/~bs/whitespace98.pdf

"Instead, it was decided to by default limit identifiers to a single character" The Wisdom of it! Preparing C++ programmers for Haskell's limitation! -- (c) this sig last receiving data processing entity. Inspect headers for copyright history. All rights reserved. Copying, hiring, renting, performance and/or broadcasting of this signature prohibited.

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 22:03, Achim Schneider wrote:

"Instead, it was decided to by default limit identifiers to a single character"

The Wisdom of it! Preparing C++ programmers for Haskell's limitation!

Oh no, you are forgetting the primes, x', y' :P I liked the motivation of "the physicists kept writing xy even the problem had been explained multiple times". Those pesky physicists.. cheers, Arnar

Miguel Mitrofanov ha scritto:

I think you might be interested in http://www.research.att.com/~bs/whitespace98.pdf

By the way, is it technically possible (and feasible), in Haskell, to define a space operator? Of cource not with the current grammar.

[...]

Manlio Perillo

On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 2:45 PM, Dan Piponi wrote:

In the proposed notation, within [[]]'s there is an implied <*> for every space.

Come to think of it, surely that's why they're called *applicative* functors. In Haskell, a space between identifiers corresponds implicitly to the 'application' operator. (Sometimes it's written explicitly as @, as in http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.54.6644). Applicative functors are simply a mechanism to allow the redefinition of application, just like how monads allow you to 'redefine' the semicolon. -- Dan