Andreas Abel <andreas.a...@ifi.lmu.de> writes: > I had been missing a pattern matching lambda in Haskell for > a long time (SML had "fn" since ages) and my typical use > will be > > monadic_expr >>= \case > branches
We’ve been through that. I want something similar, but would have preferred something more algebraic. > I think "\case" is not the worst choice, certainly better than > "of" ... What’s your argument? You’ll have to do better than blatant assertion to convince me. Making “case exp” optional builds on an existing expression syntax, giving an explicit meaning to a part of it, so a reader only has to know that “of {alts}” is a function and case does something specific with it. This “\case” takes the keyword from that expression syntax and makes it a special case of lambda, so a reader seeing a lambda now has to check for a keyword instead of knowing straight off that the next thing is going to be a variable. Back when we originally designed Haskell there were lots of things that people wanted to put in, and eventually we reached a point where we said that we would only put something new in if it allowed us to remove (or simplify) something else. “\case” complicates lambda, using “of” simply breaks “case … of …” into two easily understood parts. -- Jón Fairbairn jon.fairba...@cl.cam.ac.uk _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe