[Haskell-cafe] Re: map (-2) [1..5]

Jón Fairbairn jon.fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk
Sat Sep 9 11:11:04 EDT 2006


"Brian Hulley" <brianh at metamilk.com> writes:

> Jón Fairbairn wrote:
> > [1] “-” is a varsym. The logical way of achieving what you
> > suggest (ie -1 -2... as constructors for Integer) would be
> > to make it introduce a consym the way “:” does, but then it
> > couldn't be an infix operator anymore.
> 
> I don't think it's necessary to use the same kind of rule
> for '-' as for ':'.

Not necessary, but you surely don't want yet another rule?

> I imagine that almost every editor at least does lexical
> fontification, and if so, then I don't think there could be
> much confusion in practice between these uses of '-'.

I think that unnecessarily disadvantages people with poorer
than average (including zero) eyesight.

> Yes, a typeclass for exp would be ideal

Well, so long as you call it “exponent” or “expt”.

> (and a newtype for Natural).

Here's a design principle for you: if an error can be
detected at compile time, it should be. If we have literals
for naturals and not negative integers, “negate 100” causes
no problem, it just means “negate (fromNatural 100)”. If we
have literals for integers and try to restrict them to get
naturals, “-100:: Natural” becomes shorthand for
“integralToNatural (-100)”, and would (in the absence of
somewhat arbitrary special-casing in the compiler) give a
runtime error.

> I also agree with Tamas's suggestion that an empirical
> analysis of Haskell source code could be useful to determine
> the practical implications of unary minus,

It has merit and I would laud anyone who got round to doing
it, but there's a danger of measuring the wrong thing. What
we want to know is not what is more frequent, but what
causes the greater number of misreadings and which pieces of
code had the most syntax errors before they were completed,
and that's harder to measure. Though if unary minus turned
out to be very rare, we could just drop it. Using “(0-)”
wouldn't be much of a hardship in that case.

> Anyway no doubt I've posted enough emails about unary minus
> and negative literals so I'll be quiet now ;-)

:-) ... ?

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




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