On Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 07:45:34PM -0500, Jan-Willem Maessen wrote:
I am on the record as hating this with a burning passion, personally. This is one of those places where mathematical notation actually obscures rather than clarifying. Continuing the error in ML was a mistake. Fundamentally, I *like* that the k-tuple type in Haskell looks like a k-tuple, and not some randomly-associated infix binary operator.
Indeed, I think the unification of the type and term syntax was one of the great innovations of haskell (or at least the choice to inherit it). some mechanism to declare such aliases locally might be interesting, you would just need to declare the cross-product symbol to be a type synonym for (,) but that would be tricky as type synonyms have to be in the constructor space so we'd need something like top level type variables.. (or just declare the cross product symbol is in the constructor space) neither of which is very attractive.. John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈