On 2006-08-14 at 12:00PDT "Iavor Diatchki" wrote:
Hello, I never liked the decision to rename 'map' to 'fmap', because it introduces two different names for the same thing (and I find the name `fmap' awkward).
I strongly concur. There are far too many maps even without that, and having two names for the same thing adds to the confusion.
As far as I understand, this was done to make it easier to learn Haskell, by turning errors like "Cannot discharge constraint 'Functor X'" into "X =/= List". I am not convinced that this motivation is justified, although I admit that I have very limited experience with teaching functional programming to complete beginners. Still, students probably run into similar problems with overloaded literals, and I think, that a better approach to problems like these would be to have a simplified "learning Prelude"
Agreed. -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk