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

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

Wolfgang Jeltsch:
> Am Donnerstag, 24. April 2008 05:13 schrieb Manuel M T Chakravarty:
>> […]
>
>> Hence, anything that is *important* to change, we should change now.
>
> Although I can follow your arguments, I thought that the large and  
> disruptive
> changes should be done for Haskell 2.

Depends what you mean by Haskell 2.  If it is an experimental language  
that shares some superficial similarities with Haskell, sure we may  
have Haskell 2.  If you mean a serious successor of Haskell with the  
expectation that many/most Haskell users will eventually move to  
Haskell 2, then no.  Haskell has been gaining a lot of momentum  
recently.  That's good and bad, but surely makes it hard to change the  
trajectory.  (This is, of course, just my personal opinion.)

>  If they should really be done now, we
> should also fix a lot of other things.  For example, the Num  
> hierarchy, the
> Functor/Applicative/Monad hierarchy, the fact that there exist  
> Alternative
> and MonadPlus although we have Monoid, the fact that we cannot have  
> contexts
> like (forall a. Monoid (m a)) which is the source for the last  
> problem, the
> fact that we don’t have class aliases, ugly names like fmap and  
> mappend, etc.

As Lennart and Ganesh have argued, the amount of breaking changes that  
we we will be able to fit in without causing serious problems is  
limited.

Manuel