Wanted: warning option for usages of unary minus

[Joseph H. Fasel]

*Sigh*  The problems with unary minus were discussed in the dim mists of
time before we published the first Haskell report.  We considered then
using a separate symbol for unary negation (as does APL, for example),
but (IIRC) this was regarded as unfriendly to Fortran programmers.

Cheers,
--Joe

On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 04:37, Isaac Dupree wrote:
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> Iavor Diatchki wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I agree with Simon on this one: "x-1" should parse as expected (i.e.,
> > the infix operator "-" applied to two arguments "x" and "1"). Having
> > this result in a type error would be confusing to both beginners and
> > working Haskell programmers.
> > 
> > I think that if we want to change anything at all, we should simply
> > eliminate the unary negation operator without changing the lexer
> > (i.e., we would have only positive literals).  Then we would have to
> > be explicit about what is currently happening implicitly in
> > Haskell98---we would write "negate 1" instead of "-1".
> > 
> > However, I don't thinks that this change is justified---as far as I
> > can see, the only benefit is that it simplifies the parser.  However,
> > the change is not backward compatible and may break some programs.
> 
> Simplifies the _mental_ parser, much more important than the compilers'
> parsers which are already implemented.
> 
> Here is what I am thinking to do:
> 
> In my own code, since there seems to be so much difficulty with the
> matter, don't use (-X) to mean negative for any kind of X whatsoever.
> For this I want a warning for ALL usages of the unary minus operator.
> I'll define a function for my negative literals that calls fromInteger
> and negate in the order I would prefer to my sensibilities, which is
> actually different from the order that the Report specifies for (-x) :
> 
> > {-# INLINE negative #-}
> > negative :: Num a => Integer -> a
> > negative a = fromInteger (negate a)
> 
> I might feel like having a parallel
> 
> > {-# INLINE positive #-}
> > positive :: Num a => Integer -> a
> > positive a = fromInteger a
> 
> (e.g. C has a unary + operator... and "positive" even has the same
> number-of-characters length as "negative"!).
> 
> 
> For GHC's unboxed negative literals I think I will still change the
> lexer/parser since the current way it's done is rather confusing anyway
> (as previously described)
> 
> 
> I don't know what else is worth implementing... NOT an option to turn
> off parsing of unary minus, since warnings are good and it would just
> create more incompatibility.  John Meacham, since you seem to be
> interested, what are your thoughts now?  Advice on flag names - or any
> other discussion! is anyone interested in having something, say so? -
> would be appreciated.
> 
> 
> Isaac
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-- 
Joseph H. Fasel, Ph.D.
Process Modeling and Analysis
AET-2, MS F609
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos, NM 87545