Despite Paul having ruled on the matter, the debate still rages, with
about half saying that > is wonderful, and half saying it is awful.
Under these circumstances, Paul's ruling seems right: it is pointless
to legislate > as part of the language.
On the other hand, the current circumstance is that the main
implementations do all use the > convention. It seems reasonable to
say this in the report -- we should at least tell other implementors
what the current implementors have settled upon. This would also let
Joe use the convention in presenting the standard prelude, as he says
he would like to do.
To be precise: I propose an additional chapter of the report, labeled
`Literate comments' and no more than one page long, that states a
convention for providing literate comments, notes that it is NOT part
of Haskell but is supported by existing implementations, and mentions
that the Prelude is presented with this convention in the report. I
volunteer to draft the page.
Paul, as syntax honcho you should rule on this. Cheers, -- P
PS: Wadler's Law:
The emotional intensity of debate on a language feature
increases as one moves down the following scale:
Semantics,
Syntax,
Lexical syntax,
Comments.
