On 8 Oct, Jonathan King wrote:
> I think you might see the point. (No pun back there, I promise...) I
> understand where using "." to mean composition came from, and I know that
> it's a long-standing tradition in at least the Haskell community, but I
> don't think the visual correspondence of . to the typographic glyph
> "raised open circle" is so close that you'd really like to explain why
> you diverged from current usage so much as to choose "." to mean
> "composition".
Back in the early Haskell discussions we argued about various options,
but I think Richard Bird and Phil Wadler were insistent that, because
function composition is so important for functional programming, the
symbol used should be something with very low visual weight. Nowadays
we might actually think of using ° (which would suggest º or § for the
reverse ;-). Not to mention using · for composition...
Even though I disagreed with the use of . in the original case, I was
persuaded, and still think it ought to be a single
character. Unfortunately most of the other good candidates have been
used elsewhere.
--
Jón Fairbairn [EMAIL PROTECTED]
18 Kimberley Road [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cambridge CB4 1HH +44 1223 570179 (pm only, please)
