[Haskell-cafe] Why is $ right associative instead of left associative?

[Tomasz Zielonka]

On Sat, Feb 04, 2006 at 08:37:51PM +0100, Stefan Holdermans wrote:
> Taral wrote:
> 
> >I think it's very natural. Everything after the $, including other $
> >expressions, is applied to the stuff before the $. This saves me from
> >a lot of nested parentheses.
> 
> To me, ($) helping me to avoid writing lots of parentheses, makes it  
> extremely useful. Actually: except for passing function application  
> to higher-order functions, this is the only way I use it. So, I  
> always thought parentheses were *the* reason for the right- 
> associativity of ($). Not sure if it really was originally, but, ever  
> so, I think it is the best reason.

A left-associative low-precedence application operator can also help
avoid writing parentheses, only in different cases, eg.

    f $$ x + 1 $$ x * x + 2 * x + 1

equals

    f (x + 1) (x * x + 2 * x + 1)

But in this case the parentheses don't nest, which may be a reason
why a right-associative version was chosen. ($) helps to avoid
the case of nesting parentheses. Such nesting is unbounded, for
example you can have chains like this with arbitrary length:

    a (b (c (d (e (f x)))))

even if you only have unary functions.

Also, adding or removing a function in such a chain can require
non-local changes, that is you are forced to add or remove a closing
parenthesis on the end of expression.

If you use ($):

    a $ b $ c $ d $ e $ f x

you can easily add or remove a function in the chain.

On the other hand, adding new parameters to calls like this

    f (x + 1) (y - 1) ...

is very localised.

Best regards
Tomasz

-- 
I am searching for programmers who are good at least in
(Haskell || ML) && (Linux || FreeBSD || math)
for work in Warsaw, Poland