[Haskell-cafe] let and fixed point operator

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On Aug 31, 2007, at 16:01 , Sterling Clover wrote:

> In particular for a function -- n, m, etc or x, y, etc? What about  
> for f' defined in a let block of f? If I use x y at the top level I  
> need to use another set below -- is that where x' y' are more  
> appropriate, or x1, y1?

Usual style is x',y'.

For longer names, camelCase is the usual convention but some  
libraries which basically import everything from C via the FFI use  
C_style_names.  Imported constants/macros which are uppercase with _  
tend to be mapped to tHIS_KIND_OF_NAME (see for example the Win32  
package).

One thing to watch out for is that monads tend to carry their own  
metaconventions:  a generic monad is "m", a reader monad is "r", a  
state monad is "s", functors are "f".

> For tuples I tend to pattern match with (a,b), and for lists I tend  
> to use (h:r) for head and rest. Are there

The common convention for lists is e.g. (x:xs) (the latter is "x-es").

> other, more universal standards for these sorts of things? Another  
> related question is whether using these short sweet variable names  
> makes sense, or whether I should try to use more descriptive ones.

I generally use something short but descriptive when writing  
something specific, and single-character generic names when writing  
something that's generic and/or polymorphic.

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH