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

[Brian Hulley]

Jon Fairbairn wrote:
> Brian Hulley wrote:
>> <snip>
>
> Not exactly alone; I've felt it was wrong ever since we
> argued about it for the first version of Haskell. ":" for
> typing is closer to common mathematical notation.
>
> But it's far too late to change it now.
>
>> - it's just syntax after all

Well I'm reconsidering my position that it's "just" syntax. Syntax does 
after all carry a lot of semiotics for us humans, and if there are centuries 
of use of ":" in mathematics that are just to be discarded because someone 
in some other language decided to use it for list cons then I think it makes 
sense to correct this.

It would be impossible to get everything right first time, and I think the 
Haskell committee did a very good job with Haskell, but just as there can be 
bugs in a program, so there can also be bugs in a language design, and an 
interesting question is how these can be addressed.

For example, in the Prolog news group several years ago, there was also a 
discussion about changing the list cons operator, because Prolog currently 
uses "." which is much more useful for forming composite names - something 
which I also think has become a de-facto inter-language standard. Although 
there was much resistance from certain quarters, several implementations of 
Prolog had in fact changed their list cons operator (list cons is hardly 
ever needed in Prolog due to the [Head|Tail] sugar) to reclaim the dot for 
its "proper" use.

My final suggestion if anyone is interested is as follows:

1) Use ":" for types
2) Use "," instead of ";" in the block syntax so that all brace blocks can 
be replaced by layout if desired (including record blocks)
3) Use ";" for list cons. ";" is already used for forming lists in natural 
language, and has the added advantage that (on my keyboard at least) you 
don't even need to press the shift key! ;-)

Regards, Brian.