On Aug 14, 2006, at 3:00 PM, Iavor Diatchki wrote:
Hello,
I never liked the decision to rename 'map' to 'fmap', because it
introduces two different names for the same thing (and I find the name
`fmap' awkward).
As far as I understand, this was done to make it easier to learn
Haskell, by turning errors like "Cannot discharge constraint 'Functor
X'" into "X =/= List". I am not convinced that this motivation is
justified, although I admit that I have very limited experience with
teaching functional programming to complete beginners. Still,
students probably run into similar problems with overloaded literals,
and I think, that a better approach to problems like these would be to
have a simplified "learning Prelude" for the beginners class, rather
than changing the standard libraries of the language (writing type
signatures probably also helps...)
This idea has been kicked around a few times, but, AFAIK, it's never
really been fleshed out. Has anyone ever put anything concrete on
the table? It seems to me that most complaints are about hard-to-
understand error messages, and these almost always arise from
typeclasses. They are especially confusing when they arise from
syntax sugar. I suppose a prelude with no typeclasses and compiler
options to make all syntax non-overloaded would be one way to start.
On a related note, I've seen a number of Haskell design decisions
justified by the "beginners find it difficult" argument. Is this
argument really valid? Is there any reason not to just tell
beginners to use Helium? Is there a case for something between
Helium and full H98 (or H')?
Renaming 'fmap' to 'map' directly would probably break quite a bit of
code, as all instances would have to change (although it worked when
it was done the other way around, but there probably were fewer
Haskell programs then?). We could work around this by slowly phasing
out 'fmap': for some time we could have both 'map' and 'fmap' to the
'Functor' class, with default definitions in terms of each other. A
comment in the documentation would say that 'fmap' is deprecated. At
some point, we could move 'fmap' out of the functor class, and even
later we could completely remove it.
This is not a big deal, but I thought I'd mention it, if we are
considering small changes to the standard libraries.
-Iavor
Rob Dockins
Speak softly and drive a Sherman tank.
Laugh hard; it's a long way to the bank.
-- TMBG
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