Hello,
On 11/30/06, Philippa Cowderoy
On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Ashley Yakeley wrote:
That something might confuse the beginning user should count for nothing if it does not annoy the more experienced user.
This experienced user regularly uses a haskell interpreter for a desk calculator, not to mention for producing readable budgets that show all the working. Removing defaulting would make that extremely tedious.
I do what you suggest all the time (I mean using Hugs as a calculator) and I agree that it would be annoying without some sort of defaulting. However, I am not sure that this particular use justifies the addition of defaulting to the _language_. For example, it is possible that defaulting is implemented as a switch to the command-line interpreter. By the way, I agree with Ashley that the "it is hard to teach" argument is over-used. -Iavor