[Haskell-cafe] Cal, Clojure, Groovy, Haskell, OCaml, etc.

[Curt Sampson]

On 2009-09-30 13:45 -0300 (Wed), namekuseijin wrote:

> The Perl call is spot on.  Specially because Haskell has been
> incorporating so much syntatic sugar that it's almost looking Perlish
> noise already: [examples deleted]

No, I disagree with your particular examples; they're bog-standard
Haskell that don't use any syntatic sugar (. and $ are just library
functions), and I find them perfectly fine to read. Note that nothing
in there is inconsistent or interpreted in any sort of exceptional way,
unlike many things that look like that in Perl.

It does take time to learn to read that sort of stuff, but once you've
got it, "simplifying" this sort of thing would only make it harder to
read, because it would be more verbose without saying anything more.
Haskell's concision is one of its most important strengths.

(Incidently, a good exercise for learning to understand stuff like that
might be to go thorugh it and convert it to use parens instead of $,
full application instead of ., and so on.)

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs at starling-software.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
           Functional programming in all senses of the word:
                   http://www.starling-software.com