Am Sonntag, 18. Januar 2004 22:26 schrieb Tom Pledger:
[...]
The very first function in there
box x = [x]
reminds me of a style issue which doesn't get much attention. The issue is vocabulary. If I'm reading someone else's code (or my own old code), this
map box xs
may well sidetrack me onto finding the definition of box, whereas this
map (\x -> [x]) xs
is more self contained, and not much longer. (I don't mean any offence to the author and users of 'box'; it's a matter of personal preference, how big a function neds to be before it deserves a name.)
Since you can use return instead of box, defining box doesn't make much sense to me. When I created a list module with types for non-empty and infinite lists, I asked myself the question if adding a box-like function for non-empty lists would make sense. I dropped this idea since return does the work and having too many functions makes a library's interface unnecessarily complex.
Regards, Tom
Wolfgang