The n+k pattern issue inspired endless debates on the Haskell
committee and this feature was considered for removal in nearly every
iteration of the Haskell report. We all agreed that n+k is extremely ad-hoc but
that certain programs can be expressed slightly more elegantly using
them. Unfortunately n+k doesn't match against negative numbers, so
let n+1 = ... in .... n ...
is not the same as
let n = .... in .... (n-1) ...
Of course n+k was designed for natural numbers but these are not a
separate numeric type so you get a certain amount of confusion. One
proposal was to make naturals a distinct type and restrict n+k to only
naturals.
The syntactic issues surrounding n+k are truely awful and I still have
to look at the report to remember what happens with these:
n+1 = 2
(n+1) = 2
A lot of people would have been happy to replace n+k by some view-like
mechanism that gives the user control over the meaning of n+k but we
never managed to get views into the report.
John
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