[Haskell-cafe] Custom unary operator extension?

[Peter Verswyvelen]

Henning Thielemann wrote:
> The more syntactic constructs exist, the more complicated it becomes 
> to read such programs. Today, if you read a symbolic operator which is 
> not "-", not a single dot with a capital identifier to the left 
> (qualification), not a double dot in a bracket (enumeration) and not 
> enclosed in parentheses (prefix mode), then it is an infix operator. 
> Note the already existing exceptions, and I feel these are not 
> complete. With prefix operators it becomes more difficult.
Okay, so the choice was to enhance readability. Yes, something can be 
said for that, because in C++ and C#, operator overloading is a no-go in 
general, in those language, it is prefered to use clear and long 
function names. But as Haskell seemed more math-mind oriented, I was 
just wandering why unary operator support was missing. Since students 
will surely ask me why I can't create a symbolic operator for the "not" 
function, I now have a good answer ready ;-)

Thanks,
Peter