[ghc-steering-committee] Proposal #270: Support pun-free code. Recommendation: accept

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi,

thanks for the summary.

Am Mittwoch, dem 24.08.2022 um 07:27 +0100 schrieb Chris Dornan:
>  To (avoiding) this end, I suggest that we include wording in the
> user guide section documenting this extension to the effect that
> there is no consensus on the desirability or otherwise of the punful
> code the extension seeks to address.

I wonder if it isn’t really on us to address that and try to establish
a consensus about where we want Haskell to evolve to? Should we not try
to provide unifying guidance by choosing between

   puns are fine and good practice, the language evolution takes that into
   account
   
and

   puns are discouraged and undesirable, as they do not work smoothly with
   the Haskell we envision for the future,
   we provide work-arounds (like this proposal) when dealing with code
   that still has them
   
It seems that by accepting
https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/378 we went down
the second road, although the wording in that proposal, in section
https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0378-dependent-type-design.rst#non-design-of-dependent-types
is much more diplomatic than I was above.

Maybe the sentiment could be that puns are a bit like lazy IO: It used
to be the thing to do so, it will continue to work, but they should no
longer be considered current good practice.

Cheers,
Joachim



-- 
Joachim Breitner
  mail at joachim-breitner.de
  http://www.joachim-breitner.de/