[Haskell-cafe] lambda case (was Re: A big hurray for lambda-case (and all the other good stuff))

[Chris Smith]

On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 8:51 AM, David Thomas <davidleothomas at gmail.com>wrote:

> Jon's suggestion sounds great.
>
> The bike shed should be green.
>

There were plenty of proposals that would work fine.  `case of` was great.
 `\ of` was great.  It's less obvious to me that stand-alone `of` is never
ambiguous... but if that's true, it's reasonable.  Sadly, the option that
was worse that doing nothing at all is what was implemented.

The "bikeshedding" nonsense is frustrating.  Bikeshedding is about wasting
time debating the minutia of a significant improvement, when everyone
agrees the improvement is a good idea.  Here, what happened was that
someone proposed a minor syntax tweak (from `\x -> case x of` to `case
of`), other reasonable minor syntax tweaks were proposed instead to
accomplish the same goal, and then in the end, out of the blue, it was
decided to turn `case` into a layout-inducing keyword (or even worse, only
sometimes but not always layout-inducing).

There is no bike shed here.  There are just colors (minor syntax tweaks).
 And I don't get the use of "bikeshedding" as basically just a rude comment
to be made at people who don't like the same syntax others do.

-- 
Chris
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