Unabbreviation of Haskell's grammar tokens for readability

Mario Blažević mblazevic at stilo.com
Mon Apr 8 16:41:22 UTC 2019


On 2019-04-06 10:36 p.m., Solomon Ucko wrote:
> In the Haskell 1998 & 2010 reports, I found the names of the tokens for 
> Haskell's lexical structure / syntax / grammar very hard to read, as 
> they were highly abbreviated. I might get more familiar with them, but 
> that doesn't help newcomers, like me now. Anyone mind if I change them 
> to use full words? Mind if I separate the words with underscores? I made 
> a few changes with simple find & replace, and it made it so much more 
> readable. It did make the lines longer (duh!), but I see no reason for 
> that to be much of a problem. Or would horizontal scroll and/or 
> line-wrapping be too much of an issue? Where would the changes go, anyways?

	If the idea is to submit the changes for the next version of the 
Haskell report, they would eventually have to be submitted as a GitHub 
pull request against https://github.com/haskell/rfcs - the key word 
being eventually. You should first create a proposal with the 
explanation of the changes you want and have it accepted.


> Another thing that would be useful but could be harder to implement 
> would be links from usages to declarations of tokens.
> 
> Thanks,
> Solomon Ucko
> 
> P.S. Please let me know if this has come up before, as I have just 
> joined this list.
> 


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