Hello Cale, Wednesday, April 23, 2008, 11:26:49 AM, you wrote:
> f x+y = (x+y)^2 > f x + y = x^2 + y imho, it's easy to see what there are no spaces around + on first line, but there are spaces at the second. imho, it's just our habits - ignore spaces and split expression by operators actually, shift from usual style of f(x+y,z*t) to f (x+y) (z*t) was no less dramatic. i propose to go one step further and use spaces instead of brackets as one more way to control precedence. this idea born from my haskell programming practice - these additional parentheses are rather common and avoiding them will make program reading easier. but it needs to shift habits > That's a pretty hard to see bug, and it sneaks right past the > typechecker. I'm all for a certain amount of whitespace sensitivity, > but that might be going too far. my main point is that considering space-less operators as having larger priority is our natural habit. consider this: f a*b x+c imho, my interpretation of this expression sounds more natural than haskell's current one >> for now, wee need to standardize current haskell practice just for >> compilers interoperability and teaching purposes (noone wants to write >> book about ghc 6.8 or teach students to it) >> > Well, my point is that if we can see these changes that we want to > make to the libraries, it makes little sense to let people write those > books and then change all the libraries out from under them a few > months down the road. Maybe it's what we'll end up doing anyway, but > it's worth considering. unfortunately, it will be not a few months. there are many important things we may change in haskell. sometime ago it was said that haskell' will just standartize existing haskell (ghc/hugs) state and haskell 2 will be new, probably incompatible language. fixing just one oddity in haskell' will give us worst of both worlds - broken compatibility and lots of oddities still remaining -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Haskell-prime mailing list Haskell-prime@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime
