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

[Paul Hudak]

Actually, one of the main reasons that we chose (:) is that that's what 
Miranda used.  So, at the time at least, it was not entirely clear what 
the "de facto universal inter-language standard" was.

In any case, I agree with Stefan regarding Haskell Prime!

   -Paul


Stefan Holdermans wrote:
> Brian wrote:
> 
>> I think the mystery surrounding :: and : might have been that
>> originally people thought type annotations would hardly ever be needed
>> whereas list cons is often needed, but now that it is regarded as good
>> practice to put a type annotation before every top level value
>> binding, and as the type system becomes more and more complex (eg with
>> GADTs etc), type annotations are now presumably far more common than
>> list cons so it would be good if Haskell Prime would swap these
>> operators back to their de facto universal inter-language standard of
>> list cons and type annotation respectively.
> 
> I don't think Haskell Prime should be about changing the look and  feel 
> of the language.
> 
> Regards,
> 
>   Stefan