patch applied (haskell-prime-status): add ""Make $ left associative, like application"

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello Cale,

Wednesday, April 23, 2008, 11:26:49 AM, you wrote:

> f x+y = (x+y)^2

> f x + y = x^2 + y

imho, it's easy to see what there are no spaces around + on first
line, but there are spaces at the second. imho, it's just our habits
- ignore spaces and split expression by operators

actually, shift from usual style of f(x+y,z*t) to f (x+y) (z*t) was no
less dramatic. i propose to go one step further and use spaces instead
of brackets as one more way to control precedence. this idea born from
my haskell programming practice - these additional parentheses are
rather common and avoiding them will make program reading easier. but
it needs to shift habits

> That's a pretty hard to see bug, and it sneaks right past the
> typechecker. I'm all for a certain amount of whitespace sensitivity,
> but that might be going too far.

my main point is that considering space-less operators as having
larger priority is our natural habit. consider this:

f   a*b   x+c

imho, my interpretation of this expression sounds more natural than
haskell's current one


>>  for now, wee need to standardize current haskell practice just for
>>  compilers interoperability and teaching purposes (noone wants to write
>>  book about ghc 6.8 or teach students to it)
>>

> Well, my point is that if we can see these changes that we want to
> make to the libraries, it makes little sense to let people write those
> books and then change all the libraries out from under them a few
> months down the road. Maybe it's what we'll end up doing anyway, but
> it's worth considering.

unfortunately, it will be not a few months. there are many important
things we may change in haskell. sometime ago it was said that
haskell' will just standartize existing haskell (ghc/hugs) state and
haskell 2 will be new, probably incompatible language. fixing just one
oddity in haskell' will give us worst of both worlds - broken
compatibility and lots of oddities still remaining


-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com