[Haskell-cafe] On finding the right exposition...

Ben Franksen ben.franksen at online.de
Mon Oct 4 12:56:05 UTC 2021


Am 19.09.21 um 05:00 schrieb Anthony Clayden:
> Aside: to this day, that sort of ad-hoc syntax makes me gag. K&R should be
> publicly flogged on a regular basis.

And for so many other reasons, too, like mandating a preprocessor (with 
a complex, operationally defined semantics) simply because they couldn't 
be bothered to design a (simple, 1st order) module system. And lots of 
inconsistencies and special cases. Like functions can be declared to 
return void but trying to actually do so (return void) is an error. Or 
that void is indeed a keyword and not a typedef for "struct {}".

Talking of inconsistencies, Haskell is not without some of those. For 
instance, I never understood why (->) is right associative in types, but 
(=>) is not and you are instead supposed to pack constraints in a tuple. 
(It works in some simple cases but not consistently.)

Cheers
Ben
-- 
I would rather have questions that cannot be answered, than answers that
cannot be questioned.  -- Richard Feynman




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