[ghc-steering-committee] #477: Unicode ellipsis, recommendation: accept

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi,

it’s a worthwhile observation that we (somewhat oddly) use a two-dot
ellipsis in ASCII-Haskell, and Artem took this up on Github to ponder
if we should allow ASCII ... as well, but I am not convinced. I wrote
on the Github thread:

> Hmm, I am not sure I agree that it's confusing. At least to me, from
> the start when I saw Haskell, the ascii .. meant what's \ldots in
> LaTeX, and what I tend to write as three close-to-each other dots on
> paper and is semantically an ellipsis, which in Unicode has a
> codepoint with that names that in most fonts looks like what you
> expect it to…
> 
> So the .. is an ASCII cludge like all others (probably because ... is
> unnecessarily wide).
> 
> The analogue is \ for λ - just because the left leg is missing we
> wouldn't use a unrelated look-alike like \ for the unicode variant,
> nor ask to be able to write ,\ in ASCII for a better approximation of
> the real letter.
> 
> TL;DR: no need to change ASCII-Haskell, and let's use the
> semantically correct ellipsis symbol in Unicode-Haskell.

Vlad, how firm is your -1? If you feel strongly enough about it (which
is of course absolutely fine), I’d maybe just put this up for a vote?
It’s a mostly aesthetical, superficial change where voting may be more
efficient than long discussions.

Cheers,
Joachim

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