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

[ajb at spamcop.net]

G'day all.

Quoting Paul Hudak <paul.hudak at yale.edu>:

> 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.

Exactly.  One point that's often not appreciated is that Haskell is not
a descendent of ML.  The ML lineage is, roughly:

    Lisp -> ISWIM -> ML -> SML, LML, O'Caml etc

And the Haskell lineage is:

    Lisp -> ISWIM -> SASL -> KRC -> Miranda -> Haskell

ML is much more like an older cousin than an ancestor.

This point is important because Turner languages already had a list
syntax at the time that they adopted an ML-like type system.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage