| And I think that the solution is not to make the language larger and larger
| everytime someone wants a feature but to give people the tools to provide
| features without language changes.

Of course that would be even better!  (Provided of course the resulting 
programs were comprehensible.)  Haskell is already pretty good in this respect, 
thanks to type classes, higher order functions, and laziness; that's why it's 
so good at embedded domain-specific languages.  Template Haskell is another 
attempt to go further. Geoff Mainland's quasi-quoting idea is another.

If you have other ideas for such general tools, then it'd be great to hear 
about them.  They are much easier to wish for than to design.

But where such general tools are inadequate, well-designed syntactic sugar can 
have a powerfully beneficial effect, I think.  But it's a topic on which 
reasonable people can differ, and your judgement may well differ from mine.

Simon
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