[Haskell-cafe] omitting params in function bindings

[Edward Kmett]

There is the property that once you 'move across the = to the right', the
pattern matcher isn't allowed to backtrack and try other patterns any more,
which might introduce some funny business. Though, I can't -- at the moment
-- come up with a way that it would break anything.

-Edward Kmett

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> Is there a deep reason (beyond saving a sentence
> or two in the language definition) for requiring
> all patterns in a function binding to have the
> same explicit arity?
>
> For example, in
>        dropWhile0 :: Num a => [a] -> [a]
>        dropWhile0 (0:xs) = dropWhile0 xs
>        dropWhile0 xs = xs
> why shouldn't the last line be replaceable by
>        dropWhile0 = id
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