Cale Gibbard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > This really isn't so bad in practice though. I've certainly never been > confused by it.
Well, what can I say? Good for you? > You'd have to go out of your way to construct a > situation in which it's potentially confusing No. > There are much more important issues to deal with than this, really. Like inventing as many new and wonderful symbolic operators as possible! Hey, why not allow quoted function names? So that I can defined a function "f " different from "f "? Or differentiate (+4) from completely different (+ 4), ( +4) and ( + 4) which *obviously* are entirely differen things? > might be relevant in the IOHCC, but not in ordinary programming. So why not go for the Obfuscated Language Design Contest instead? > In a sane language, small amounts of whitespace sensitivity are going > to be around no matter what you do. And if you already are using whitespace to separate words, surely the logical (not to mention aesthetical) way forward would be to introduce evene more whitespace sensitivity - here is the Holy Grail http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/index.php I don't understand why this isn't obvious to people who generally appear fairly bright, but: introducing extension that turns working programs into non-working ones is generally a bad idea. Having it be due to spacing habits around symbolic operators is worse. That spacing changes suddenly starts bringing very complex language extensions into the picture, with an associated heap of incomprehensible error messages is *not* a nice thing for anybody - except, perhaps, the two academics who wrote the paper, and the three academics who read it. -------------------- </rant> Okay, I'm being unfair here. Haskell is an academic language, its primary purpose is to produce papers, not software. And as a mere programmer, I'm in a minority. I think Haskell is really cool, but I don't really belong here, and I realize of course that my voice isn't going to carry a lot of weight. But IF there is a desire for Haskell to be used for Real Work, I think there should be a certain degree of stability. Taking the function composition operator and turning it into record selection -- depending on spacing, of course -- is, IMO, madness. But good luck on those papers, and see you later, probably on the Clean mailing lists. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
