| > > In the list of features "required for Haskell in practice", bang
patterns are
| > > way up there.
| >
| > But their syntax has issues:
| >
| > a!b = ...
| >
| > Did I just define the function "a" or the function "!"?
|
| Interesting note, if we solve this, then we can apply the same thing to
| the treatment of ~ and regain it as a usable operator.
In GHC I implemented a pretty grotesque hack. I really really wanted
f !x !y = e
to work as you'd expect. But because of the infix operator thing, that parses
as
(f ! x) ! y = e
A gruesome post-processing step restores the parse we want, for the special
case of !. It's not nice, but I didn't have the luxury of changing anything
else, which we do now.
Not allowing infix functions on the LHS would be a notable simplification.
Constructors in patterns should still be infix of course:
f (a :=: b) = ...
In any case, I've always thought this was weird:
Just x == Just y = x == y
Simon
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