since Pattern Guards appear to be popular with the committee, I suggest to revisit the decision to drop guards from lambdas: (a) http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/haskell-1990-2000/msg00353.html (b) http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/haskell-1990-2000/msg00382.html 1. I disagree that this was a simplification of Haskell the language became smaller (fewer valid programs), but that reduction in size was bought by breaking a symmetry (pattern matches are the same whereever they are used) and adding a restriction (no guards for patterns in lambdas), so the smaller language is actually more complicated. 2. adding guards to lambdas can only cause more program runs to fail (no chance of handling pattern-match/guard failure and fall through), so it is kind of understandable that this feature was considered dubious. however, - adding a guard there is comparable to adding an assertion, a feature often considered valuable - with pattern guards, the guard is no longer restricted to filtering, and that added functionality is not currently accessible for lambda patterns suggestion: undo removal of guards from lambdas, especially (but not only) if pattern guards make it into the language. claus ps. are there any notes regarding the discussion and stylistic grounds mentioned in (a)?