Let's remember that if something is broke, it's only _right_ to _fix_
it. I patiently waited for someone else to make that pun.

Understanding the language won't be much harder, but understanding
fixity declarations will become a task. Consider:

infixl -1.7521  -- what and why?

As the operator space becomes more dense, negative and fractional
fixities are going to become more obfuscated. The negative and
fractional fixities will satisfy a number purposes well, but they will
also be abused and lead to confusion.

This smells like a wart growing on a wart to me.

Nick

On 11/7/06, David House <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 07/11/06, Jon Fairbairn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I must say though, that I don't like the reasoning that we
> can put in fractional fixities because it's a small
> change. The way to hell is through a series of small
> steps. If using integers to express fixities is a bit of a
> hack, switching to rational numbers is a hack on top of a
> hack.

Well, It's a _conceptually_ simple idea, one that doesn't make
understanding the language much harder.

Also, it provides an infinite space for fixities. I think the problem
'binds tighter than X but not as tight as Y', where X and Y are only
fixity integer apart is somewhat common, and this would fix it. It
would allow for extensibility into the future, where the operator
space will only become more dense, and maintaining a complete order
with only 10 integers to play will become more and more difficult.
Allowing an infinite amount of operators to come between any two
operators sounds like a solid design decision to me.

--
-David House, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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