On 2006-02-05, Brian Hulley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Jon Fairbairn wrote: >> Brian Hulley wrote: >>> <snip> >> >> Not exactly alone; I've felt it was wrong ever since we >> argued about it for the first version of Haskell. ":" for >> typing is closer to common mathematical notation. >> >> But it's far too late to change it now. >> >>> - it's just syntax after all > > Well I'm reconsidering my position that it's "just" syntax. Syntax does > after all carry a lot of semiotics for us humans, and if there are centuries > of use of ":" in mathematics that are just to be discarded because someone > in some other language decided to use it for list cons then I think it makes > sense to correct this. > > It would be impossible to get everything right first time, and I think the > Haskell committee did a very good job with Haskell, but just as there can be > bugs in a program, so there can also be bugs in a language design, and an > interesting question is how these can be addressed. > > For example, in the Prolog news group several years ago, there was also a > discussion about changing the list cons operator, because Prolog currently > uses "." which is much more useful for forming composite names - something > which I also think has become a de-facto inter-language standard. Although > there was much resistance from certain quarters, several implementations of > Prolog had in fact changed their list cons operator (list cons is hardly > ever needed in Prolog due to the [Head|Tail] sugar) to reclaim the dot for > its "proper" use. > > My final suggestion if anyone is interested is as follows: > > 1) Use ":" for types > 2) Use "," instead of ";" in the block syntax so that all brace blocks can > be replaced by layout if desired (including record blocks) > 3) Use ";" for list cons. ";" is already used for forming lists in natural > language, and has the added advantage that (on my keyboard at least) you > don't even need to press the shift key! ;-) > > Regards, Brian.
If anything, using ',' for block syntax and ';' for lists is backwards. ',' is used for generic lists in English, whereas ';' is used for seperating statements or lists. But I like the current syntax just fine. -- Aaron Denney -><- _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
