Composition operator [was: Re: Records in Haskell]

[Donn Cave]

>> > Quoth Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com>,
>> ...
>> > Seems obvious to me:  on the one hand, there should be a plain-ASCII
>> > version of any Unicode symbol; on the other, the ASCII version has
>> > shortcomings the Unicode one doesn't (namely the existing conflict between
>> > use as composition and use as module and now record qualifier).  So, the
>> > Unicode one requires support but avoids weird parse issues.
>>
>> OK.  To me, the first hand is all you need - if there should be a
>> plain-ASCII version of any Unicode symbol anyway, then you can avoid
>> some trouble by just recognizing that you don't need Unicode symbols
>> (let alone with different parsing rules.)
>>
>
> What?  The weird parsing rules are part of the ASCII one; it's what the
> Unicode is trying to *avoid*. We're just about out of ASCII, weird parsing
> is going to be required at some point.

What what?  Are you not proposing to allow both ways to write
composition, "." and "<unicode symbol>" at the same time, but
with different syntactical requirements?  Unicode characters as
code would be bad enough, but mixing them with a hodge-podge of
ASCII aliases with different parsing rules isn't going to win
any prizes for elegance.

	Donn