A... should be split into "A.." and "." I found a compromise: let's make it a lexing error! :-) At least that agrees with what some Haskell compilers implement. No current Haskell compiler/interpreter agrees with what the report seems to say, that is that "A..." should be lexed as the two tokens "A.." and ".", and similarly, "A.where" should be lexed as "A.wher" followed by "e".
Hi. I'm really new to Haskell, just learning it, and I must say I'm pretty overwhelmed by the large variety of constructs. (=>, <-, \ to name a few) But I'm just writing this to let you guys know (surely you know this already) that anyone from a C/C++/Java/Delphi background is going to completely misunderstand the meaning of A.anything in Haskell... it's completely nonintuitive to people with my background. I kinda like dot notation because it ties together the symbols visually, for instance "myrec.myfield" is more of a unit than "myrec myfield". It stays together better when surrounded by other code, and would result in fewer parenthesis necessary. Haskell to me seems to be a great language with a syntax problem, and a bad case of too many ways to do the same thing; thus every programmer does things their own way and it's difficult to grasp the language by looking at various programs, since they're all so very different. As a small example, there's 'let' vs. 'where'. Maybe a bit of pruning would be in order. That said, I still think it looks more promising than any other language I've looked at that actually is being actively used and maintained and has a decent installed base and good cross platform support. So I will learn it. I just wish the transition was easier and that it took less time to learn. ;) Sean