Add haskell-src as an official machine-readable component of the Haskell standard

[S. Doaitse Swierstra]

On 17 nov 2010, at 16:21, Ben Millwood wrote:

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 8:52 AM, Yitzchak Gale <gale at sefer.org> wrote:
>> Reading this proposal I think it clearly states my point made earlier: allowing infix specifications everywhere provides unneeded  flexibility and unnecessary complexity.
>> 
>> Ideally I would like to see them even before the module keyword: they state how to read the text that follows, and thus fall in the category of:
>> 
>> - LANGUAGE pragma's which add sometimes extra syntax
>> - import's, which extend the name space
>> 
>> Restricting them to occur only directly after the imports is something I cannot see anyone to object to, and would enable the immediate correct parsing of all expressions to follow.
>> 
>> Doaitse
>> 
> 
> This is an interesting idea! It would certainly solve a fair few
> issues with fixity parsing, but I worry that we'd lose a lot of
> consistency, and/or gain a lot of redundancy - we want operators to
> associate the same way in every file, but people will have different
> ideas about which way to associate what (I like associating $ to the
> left, but I generally don't for the sake of my readers' sanity).
> Plus, like explicit import lists, I suspect that a list of all
> operators used in the program, potentially some distance away from
> their usage site, is going to invite subtle errors when people forget
> to add one, redundancy when people forget to remove one, and noise in
> patch files when people do the right thing. So as much as I want to
> see Haskell's infix syntax simplified, I'm not sure this is a
> practical way to do so. I once had the idea of having fixity
> determined in some sense by the name of the operator - long operators
> binding more tightly/loosely than short ones, or an angle bracket in
> the right place changing the associativity - but I don't think there's
> any satisfactory way of doing that either.

That is why I refined the proposal in my last sentence to only allowing them after the import's. It is also the only way I see programming environments ever becoming "priority aware".

Doaitse


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