[Haskell-cafe] Language complexity & beginners (Was: New type of ($) operator in GHC 8.0 is problematic)

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 02/08/2016 11:13 AM, Marcin Mrotek wrote:
>     1. Delete the unnameable
>     3. Remove all specialness of it
> 
> 
> ... and end up with absolutely no way to apply functions that return
> unboxed values?
> 

I think the point is that we don't need to worry about what the type of
" " is in the expression "f x", because it's syntax for function
application. If we had /explicit/ syntax for function application (read
the PDF, it's good), there would be no problem to begin with -- syntax
isn't typed.

The suggestion in the PDF is basically to drop the "f x" syntax and
always use "f $ x" which has a lot of merit if you rename "$" to
something less ugly and more obvious. The paper proposes "f.x", but you
could also equate "f." with "f()" to make something crazy like "f(x)" work.