[Haskell-cafe] Proposal: Infix expression keyword: -XInfixExpressions

[Erik Hesselink]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 4:42 PM, Christopher Done <chrisdone at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 19 February 2015 at 16:29, Erik Hesselink <hesselink at gmail.com> wrote:
>> If I'm reading it correctly, the only example where a fold wouldn't
>> work is <*>, right? And probably conduits, I don't know the types
>> there.
>
> Right, I see three use-cases:
>
> * Some things are foldable cleanly like monoids, so you can just
> mconcat [x,y,z] and that'll be inlined (I think).
> * Other things like x <|> y is not the same as asum [x,y] due to the
> additional mempty being introduced. You can also use foldl1 kind of
> functions, but they are partial and therefore not desirable.

Do you mean execution-wise? Because semantically there should be no
difference, I think. Although now that I think of it, there might be
for things that carry information in the mempty case, like ErrorT,
when they are right biased. It could be argued that this is a bug, and
ExceptT fixes it. You could write monoids that do the same thing, e.g.

instance Monoid b => Monoid (Either String b) where
  mempty = Left ""
  mappend (Right x) _             = Right x
  mappend _             y             = y

I have a feeling that `Alternative (f a)` should satisfy the Monoid
laws for `Monoid (f a)`, but that doesn't seem to be documented. It
does say 'a monoid on applicative functors', so perhaps it's implied.

> * Finally, things like <*>, $=, $, ., #/:& (e.g. in HList/vinyl) can't
> be folded at all, because the types are different.
>
> The third use-case doesn't have a solution that I'm aware of. So this
> solves that. It also solves the second use-case, which has only a
> partial (he he) solution. The first use-case is just a bonus. Should I
> add this clarification to the proposal?

Yes, that sounds good. It wasn't immediately obvious to me in the
first paragraph why you would want this, and after the examples, I
thought "meh". This list is very clarifying, and the third bullet is
much more convincing to me.

Erik