Haskell 98 Report possible errors, part one

Olaf Chitil olaf@cs.york.ac.uk
Mon, 23 Jul 2001 17:52:03 +0100


> The report is vainly trying to say that, regardless of what is
> lexically in scope, the builtin syntax refers to Prelude entities.
> 
> Perhaps I should reword the offending paragraph to say:
> 
>     Free variables and constructors used in these translations
>     refer to entities defined by the Prelude, regardless of what
>     variables or constructors are actually in scope.  For example,
>    "concatMap" used in the translation of list comprehensions (Section
> 3.11)
>     means the "concatMap" defined by the Prelude, regardless of whether
>     or not "concatMap" or "Prelude.concatMap" are in scope.
> 
> Would that be better?

You can probably delete the first ", regardless ..." subsentence for
better readability. Maybe you should add "and refer unambiguously to the
Prelude." to the end of the last sentence?

Or does the report state somewhere that being in scope includes not
being ambiguous? Unfortunately, as far as I see, the report does not
even explain what it means for an identifier to be ambiguous.

-- 
OLAF CHITIL, 
 Dept. of Computer Science, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK. 
 URL: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~olaf/
 Tel: +44 1904 434756; Fax: +44 1904 432767