Cale Gibbard wrote:
Hello,
In keeping with my small but seemingly extremely controversial suggestions for changes to the Prelude, here's a suggestion which I think is elegant and worth considering for the Haskell' Prelude:
Rename fmap to map (like it was in Haskell 1.4), and define (.) as a synonym for it.
One thing I fear (though that fear may be irrational) is that you get code that looks like "(.) . ((.) . (.) .)". To me, and I expect to many people, map and composition are different things, and used in different ways. If both are written as a dot it will take extra mental effort to decipher the meaning of a program. The potential for writing code that resembles the worst outputs of the @pl lambdabot plugin also becomes larger. Cale: do you have some real world examples of code you wrote using (.) = fmap? Secondly, I am really fond of the Applicative notation <$>, which goes great together with <*>. A lighter notation would be nice, but I see no good way to do that. (Perhaps we need to add syntactic sugar for idiom brackets?) Twan