Proposal: ArgumentDo

[Evan Laforge]

On Wed, Jul 6, 2016 at 10:39 AM, Bardur Arantsson <spam at scientician.net> wrote:
> On 07/04/2016 12:31 PM, Akio Takano wrote:
>> Hi glasgow-haskell-users,
>>
>> I have written a wiki page about a proposed extension called
>> ArgumentDo. It's a small syntactic extension that allows "do"
>> expressions, lambdas and a few other kinds of expressions to be used
>> as function arguments, without parentheses.
>>
>> https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ArgumentDo
>>
>> Any feedback is appreciated. In particular, since the idea has
>> received mixed support (see the "Discussion" section on the wiki
>> page), I'd like to make sure that there is enough support for this
>> feature to justify an implementation in GHC.
>>
>
> -1
>
> Reasons have already been given in previous threads on this. However,
> I'd point especially to the fact that people don't *agree* that this is
> more readable as a very strong point against -- regardless of whether
> any one individual thinks it's more readable or not. The point is the
> there seems to be a lot of disagreement -- that indicates to me that
> this cannot by definition be a "clear win"[1]. Disclosure: I personally
> find it less readable because of the implicitness. Implicitness which
> has a non-trivial probability of affecting semantics is bad in my book.
> Frankly, if it came to it, I'd rather just remove $ and deal with the
> parentheses.

I'm -1 because I think there are already too many styles.  So I don't
agree with the general sentiment that the parser should accept lots of
stuff and to rely on style guides to specify something, because in
practice everyone has their own style guide.

I trained myself to see juxtaposition as highest precedence (which
newcomers still struggle over) and it's confusing to see juxtaposition
that has higher precedence because one of them is a keyword.  In the
same way I'm confused by 'f a { b = c }', but it's too late to change
that one.  I suppose this is already on the wiki page in the "cons"
section.