[Haskell-cafe] Language simplicity

[Andrew Coppin]

Martijn van Steenbergen wrote:
> Niklas Broberg wrote:
>> 21 actually. case, class, data, default, deriving, do, else, if,
>> import, in, infix, infixl, infixr, instance, let, module, newtype, of,
>> then, type, where. There's also three special words that can still be
>> used as identifiers, so aren't reserved: as, qualified, hiding.
>
> Since you can define operators in Haskell, would it make sense to 
> include '=', '--', ':', ',' etc. as "reserved names" since those can't 
> be used as operator names?

Makes sense to me...

It's merely more difficult to catelogue this information for a 
half-dozen different languages. Looking up the reserved word list is 
usually only a Google search away.

Somebody suggested to me that the best metric for "how difficult" a 
language is to learn is "the number of orthogonal concepts you need to 
learn". Of course, measuring THAT is going to be no picknick!