Proposal: require spaces around the dot operator

[Daniel Peebles]

I'm very happy to see all the work you're putting into the record
discussion, but I'm struggling to see why people are fighting so hard to
get the dot character in particular for field access. It seems like a huge
amount of work and discussion for a tiny bit of syntactic convenience that
we've only come to expect because of exposure to other very different
languages.

Is there some fundamental reason we couldn't settle for something like # (a
valid operator, but we've already shown we're willing to throw that away in
the MagicHash extension) or @ (only allowed in patterns for now)? Or we
could even keep (#) as a valid operator and just have it mean category/lens
composition.

Thanks,
Dan

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 9:11 PM, Greg Weber <greg at gregweber.info> wrote:

> Similar to proposal #20, which wants to remove it, but immediately
> less drastic, even though the long-term goal is the same.
> This helps clear the way for the usage of the unspaced dot as a record
> field selector as shown in proposal #129.
>
> After this proposal shows clear signs of moving forward I will add a
> proposal to support a unicode dot for function composition.
> After that we can all have a lively discussion about how to fully
> replace the ascii dot with an ascii alternative such as <~ or <<<
> After that we can make the dot operator illegal by default.
>
> This has already been discussed as part of a records solution on the
> ghc-users mail list and documented here:
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Records/DotOperator
>
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