[Haskell-beginners] [x] and (x:_) for lists -- did you ever think that odd?

[Tom Murphy]

On May 20, 2012 7:59 PM, "Ertugrul Söylemez" <es at ertes.de> wrote:
>
> AntC <anthony_clayden at clear.net.nz> wrote:
>
> > Would this pattern matching seem less odd?:
> >
> >      head       [x ..] = x
> >      length     [x, xs at ..] = 1 + length xs
>
> No, it seems and is more odd.  Why hide the list constructors behind
> weird notation?  Why require syntactic peculiarities and special cases
> for pattern-matching lists?  In particular, what does pattern-matching
> against "enumFrom x" mean?  Oh, it means something different here?
>
> Your proposed syntax is very arbitrary and helps to confuse everybody.
> Haskell has very simple syntactic rules, and I'm sure I'm speaking for
> most of the Haskell community when I say that we would like to keep it
> that way.  We have access to the two list constructors (:) and []
> directly and they are very convenient, so there is no need for weird
> syntax just to enforce a set of ASCII characters in source code.
>
>
> > Experienced Haskellers need not answer: you've got too used to ( :  )
> > ;-)
>
> Sorry, but this statement is very infantile.  Even if meant as a joke,
> it's at best offensive and at worst insulting.  There is good reasoning
> behind (:) and [], and just because you don't see it there is no reason
> to imply that experienced Haskell programmers are stubborn.  Haskell
> programmers are about as open-minded as programmers can get.
>

I think it was just a joke.

> If you want people to take your proposals seriously, you shouldn't
> offend the very persons who evaluate them.
>
>
> Greets,
> Ertugrul
>
> --
> nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex)
> http://ertes.de/
>
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