[Haskell-cafe] Looking for a paper

[Ben Lippmeier]

> On 10 Apr 2019, at 12:00 am, Michael Orlitzky <michael at orlitzky.com> wrote:
> 
> Everyone knows that parentheses suck for function application.
> 
> But I'm looking for a CS paper that argues that function application
> should have its own explicit syntax in a functional programming
> language. I believe, in the paper, that a dot "." was used, but this
> would be analogous to Haskell's "$" function, except that it would be
> made part of the language definition.
> 
> I think it came up on this mailing list (where else would I have seen
> it?), and if anyone remembers the name or author I'd be grateful.


Hi Michael, long time..

Check out:

A useful lambda-notation.
Fairouz Kamareddine, Rob Nederpelt.
Theoretical Computer Science 115 (1996) 85-109

They use “item notation”, and argue that maybe function application isn’t what we should be writing to begin with.

Ben.