On 9/28/06, I wrote:
I would like to suggest a correction to ticket #56, "Pattern Guards".
Here is a summary of the discussion: There seems to be a consensus that the main "Pro" currently listed in the ticket is not the real reason. Pros: - Many people have been accustomed to using this syntax for a long time. - Some people find pattern guards to be elegant and aesthetically pleasing. - The alternative monadic style requires knowledge of monads. - More selections are pushed to the lefthand-side of bindings. - Already implemented in most compilers, appears to be easy to implement. Cons: - The semantics of "<-" are further overloaded in a potentially confusing way. - At least one person does not find pattern guards to be elegant and aesthetically pleasing at all. :) - Some people feel that the net gain, if any, is not worth the cost of changing the syntax of the core of Haskell. (Others do not see it as so much of a change, since it has been available in practice for a long time.) Anything else? -Yitz