"Simon Peyton-Jones" wrote,

| The Maybe module defines one datatype. THSyntax defines | many. One problem is that constructors of some of these | data types clash. For examples both Exp and Pat have | variables and literals.

Fair enough. Let's use 'P' for Pat, and nothing for Exp. Thus Var and VarP or PVar. I.e. leave Exp, the heaviest hitter of all, unannotated. Would that serve?

Then the only oddities are 'Let' and 'Case' because the lower-case smart constructors (only) clash with the Haskell keywords. Is that a good enough reason to add 'E' to every constructor (concrete and smart)? My nose says 'no' but yours may differ. For these, I think Let/letE and Case/caseE are not so bad. An alternative would be to use Bind and Switch instead.

`Bind'/`bind' has the same number of characters as `LetE'/`letE' and `Switch'/`switch' has even one more character than `CaseE'/`caseE'. I still think the number one priority is to have no exceptions in the naming scheme. If you want to go for one letter suffixes, that's perfectly fine with me. If you absolutely don't want to spent the extra letter on the constructors of Exp, so be it. However, I am pretty sure, plenty of people will write `LetE' in their programs (because it is the name consistent with the rest of module), only to get a compiler error, look at the interface of THSyntax, go back into their editor, and remove the `E'. Then, they will wonder why all constructors have a one letter suffix, only Exp doesn't. Sorry for being stubborn on this, but I just don't see the advantage of saving one character if that risks that people have to refer to the documentation more often (or at least get a compiler error before they remember again that they are dealing with an exception). Manuel