[Haskell-cafe] Line noise

Andrew Coppin andrewcoppin at btinternet.com
Mon Sep 22 16:50:08 EDT 2008


Stephan Friedrichs wrote:
> Andrew Coppin wrote:
>   
>> [...]
>> - Variable names such as "x" and "f" aren't fabulously helpful to lost
>> programmers trying to find their way.
>>     
>
> I'm not a fan of cryptic variable names, either, and I try to use
> descriptive names wherever I can. But in Haskell...
>
>  - ... you often have variables, which have a scope of far less than a
>    line such as in "map (\(x, (_, y)) -> (x, y) ..." (cleaning
>    intermediate results from a list).
>
>  - ... things often get very abstract, so that it just feels wrong
>    matching on, say, (socket:sockets) instead of (x:xs).
>
>   

...so, more or less the reason why mathematical formulas usually end up 
with non-descriptive variable names then. ;-)



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