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

Manuel M T Chakravarty chak at cse.unsw.edu.au
Wed Apr 23 22:54:04 EDT 2008


Lennart Augustsson:
> I my opinion, anyone who suggest changing the associativity of $ is  
> insane.
> Or just hating every Haskell user.  Changing $ would make virtually  
> every Haskell program uncompilable.
>
> Just pick some other (Unicode?) operator, but leave $ alone.

I agree that the power/weight ratio for changing the associativity of  
$ is not convincing at all.[1]  Like the choice of (.) for function  
composition, it is something that Haskell will have to live with,  
forever.

Nevertheless, I think unicode for standard operators is also a no-go  
for Haskell'.  We discussed this on the committee list, and really,  
tool support for unicode is still very poor.  Even cut-copy-paste of  
unicode text between different apps on MacOS -which seems to support  
unicode comparatively well- often doesn't work.  Some applications,  
such as X11 for MacOS, don't seem to support unicode at all.  The  
situation on Linux is even worse.  Moreover, it is often difficult and  
definitely not uniform across platforms how to enter unicode characters.

Manuel

[1] Don't get me wrong, I also stumbled over the associativity of $  
before and I agree that it should be different.  I just don't think  
the gain is worth the hassle.


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