On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 10:19:07AM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
Really? I'm beginning to have second thoughts about the proposed change to negation for Haskell'. The main reason, and this isn't pointed out as well as it should be on the wiki, is that "x-1" will cease to be an infix application of (-), it will parse as x applied to the literal (-1). And this is different from "x - 1" (syntax in which whitespace matters should be avoided like the plague, IMO). I think this would be worse than the current situation.
White space already matters when it comes to numbers quite a bit 0 x 123 vs 0x123 1.5 vs 1 . 5 3e4 vs 3 e 4 etc. I think this change is more than worth it. I mean, having to write (-4) everywhere is bad enough, but when writing polymorphic code, (fromInteger (-4)) is horrific to embed everywhere. :) another option would be to only count it as a negative if there is a non-identifier character preceeding it. A little ugly. but still better than the current situation IMHO. John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈