Unicode's greek lambda

[Simon Marlow]

Duncan Coutts wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-11-18 at 11:51 +0000, Ross Paterson wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 10:30:01AM +0000, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
>>>> When the -XUnicodeSyntax option is specified, GHC accepts some Unicode
>>>> characters including left/right arrows. Unfortunately, the letter
>>>> "greek lambda" cannot be used. Are there any technical reasons to not
>>>> accept it?
>>> The "greek lambda" is a normal lower-case alphabetic character - it can
>>> be used in identifier names.
>> But it could be a reserved word synonymous with \.  After all, \ can
>> occur in operator symbols, but the operator \ is reserved.
> 
> Presumably that would let you do (\ x -> ...) but not (\x -> ) since the
> "\x" would run together and lexically it would be one identifier.

Exactly.  Here's the relevant patch:

Tue Jan 16 16:11:00 GMT 2007  Simon Marlow <simonmar at microsoft.com>
   * Remove special lambda unicode character, it didn't work anyway
   Since lambda is a lower-case letter, it's debatable whether we want to
   steal it to mean lambda in Haskell source.  However if we did, then we
   would probably want to make it a "special" symbol, not just a reserved
   symbol, otherwise writing \x->... (using unicode characters of course)
   wouldn't work, because \x would be treated as a single identifier,
   you'd need a space.

Cheers,
	Simon