[Haskell-cafe] Re: Float instance of 'read'

Mauricio briqueabraque at yahoo.com
Thu Sep 18 08:13:48 EDT 2008


>> Agree about the answer, not about the question. The
>> correct one would be "is it possible to change haskell
>> syntax to support the international notation (...)
> 
> For some sense of "possible", the answer is clearly yes.
> However, it is perhaps misleading to call commas
> "THE international notation".  (...)   You might as
> well ask "is it possible to change Haskell syntax to
> support only the *real* Arabic digits ... for ...
> numbers".  (... + evindences that there isn't one
 > single standard)

Well, utf-8 strings seemed to me a good way to initialize
variables, and we could, for instance use something
like "[1,2,3,4]" to initialize other kinds of lists
besides the standard one. One example I got from gtk2hs
are marked-up text on labels. So, I actually thought
we could add support for arabic and japanese digits,
and any other ways we get without ambiguities (continued
fractions, I would like, and I also liked the idea of
the raised dot).

Well, after all the comments, I'm convinced changing
the Show and Read classes are not the way to go. But
I'll think of something like a InitializableByUFT8String
class, and I'll advertize it here if I ever get
something usable and interesting.

Thanks for your comments,
Maurício



More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list