[Haskell-cafe] RE: [Haskell] Nested guards?

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| And I think that the solution is not to make the language larger and larger
| everytime someone wants a feature but to give people the tools to provide
| features without language changes.

Of course that would be even better!  (Provided of course the resulting programs were comprehensible.)  Haskell is already pretty good in this respect, thanks to type classes, higher order functions, and laziness; that's why it's so good at embedded domain-specific languages.  Template Haskell is another attempt to go further. Geoff Mainland's quasi-quoting idea is another.

If you have other ideas for such general tools, then it'd be great to hear about them.  They are much easier to wish for than to design.

But where such general tools are inadequate, well-designed syntactic sugar can have a powerfully beneficial effect, I think.  But it's a topic on which reasonable people can differ, and your judgement may well differ from mine.

Simon