[Haskell-cafe] Fractional/negative fixity?

[Jon Fairbairn]

On 2006-11-07 at 18:30+0100 Henning Thielemann wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Nov 2006, Simon Marlow wrote:
> 
> > This is a much more heavyweight change, and its not a clear win.
> 
> Haskell 2 ? :-)
> 
> > If you'd like to make a concrete proposal, then feel free to do so and
> > I'll make sure it gets onto the wiki.
> 
> What about the one of Jón Fairbairn ?
>  http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2006-October/018925.html

The proposal to which that message refers was made before
Haskell really existed: we didn't know the concrete syntax
of the language, so I used arbitrary keywords. Even if we
look at Phil Wadler's subsequent tidying up of it, I'm not
at all sure how it fits with the language as it stands
now. So while it might make a reasonable starting point, I
don't think it yet counts as a concrete proposal!



I must say though, that I don't like the reasoning that we
can put in fractional fixities because it's a small
change. The way to hell is through a series of small
steps. If using integers to express fixities is a bit of a
hack, switching to rational numbers is a hack on top of a
hack.

 
 Jón
-- 
Jón Fairbairn                              Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk