[Haskell-cafe] Splitting Hairs Over Terminology

Dan Weston westondan at imageworks.com
Mon Feb 26 22:49:58 EST 2007


P. R. Stanley wrote:
> You know, as soon as I posted the message I remembered the destructive  
> assignment thingummy. the following is what I was talking about:
> Prelude> 13:[1, 2]
> [13, 1, 2]
> which I don't believe has an address in the memory, correct?

No. It does have a well-defined address in memory, which is there as 
long as you need it (and then garbage-collected away sometime thereafter).

> Back to the comma, surely, syntax sugar fulfills the role of an 
> operator, a function, or a sequence of low-level procedures, either in 
> part or comprehensively.

The ":" is actually a constructor, which is a function that is fully 
evaluated at compile time and on which you can do pattern matching. The 
list syntax also forms such a pattern.

> In C, for example, iteration could be implemented using the if construct 
> with the dreaded goto command. So, strictly speaking, the while loop 
> could be classed as syntax sugar. Yet, the while loop is a 
> well-recognized construct in its own right.
> I hope you can see what I'm driving at.

Syntactic sugar is fully desugared at compile time. A while loop with 
constant limits *could* be considered syntactic sugar if the compiler 
can statically unroll the loop. Variable limits are definitely beyond 
this definition, since they can only be evaluated at runtime.

Dan Weston




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