On 27 Nov 2008, at 19:59, circ ular wrote:
I suggest Haskell introduce some syntactic sugar for Maps.
Python uses {"this": 2, "is": 1, "a": 1, "Map": 1}
Clojure also use braces: {:k1 1 :k2 3} where whitespace is comma but commas are also allowed.
I find the import Data.Map and then fromList [("hello",1), ("there", 2)] or the other form that I forgot(because it is to long!) to be to long...
So why not {"hello": 1, "there": 2} ?
In a similar vein, I suggest not only to not do this, but also for Haskell' to remove syntactic sugar for lists (but keep it for strings)! I have two (three if you agree with my opinions on other parts of the language) reasons for this: 1) It's a special case, that doesn't gain anything much. [a,b,c,d] is actually only one character shorter and not really any clearer than a:b:c:d:[]. 2) Removing it would clear up the ',' character for use in infix constructors. 3) (requiring you to agree with my opinions about tuples) it would allow for clearing up the tuple type to be replaced with pairs instead. (,) could become a *real* infix data constructor for pairs. This would make us able to recreate "tuples" simply based on a right associative (,) constructor. I realise there is a slight issue with strictness, and (,) introducing more bottoms in a "tuple" than current tuples have, but I'm sure a strict version of the (,) constructor could be created with the same semantics as the current tuple. Just my 2p Thanks Tom Davie