On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 4:57 PM, Andreas Abel <andreas.abel@ifi.lmu.de> wrote:

Frankly, the proposal text does not make clear what exactly you want to do.

I would guess the name 'fmap' was chosen for 'Functor' because 'map' was already taken for lists.

About 15 years ago (in Haskell 1.4), 'map' was the name of the method of the Functor class. Then it was changed to 'fmap' and the monomorphic 'map' was added.

(Hint: go read the Haskell 1.4 report if you want to see a version of Haskell that is better than the one we have today in a dozen or so ways. :))

So it would make sense to

1. remove Prelude.map
2. make map an alias for fmap

Then, in 50 years from now we can deprecate fmap and remove it in 100 years from now. ;-)

I suspect that is the proposal, although it probably entails getting rid of Data.List.map (and re-exporting the Functor version) as well to not be a significant pain.

It is possible to break some things by doing this, but the corner cases involved ought to be pretty rare.

-- Dan