possible bug?

[Sigbjorn Finne]

Jonathon Bell jbell@mathsoft.com writes:
>
> i'm tinkering with the Feb 2001 release of hugs, and came across the
> following problem while attempting to create my own prelude:
>
>  module MyPrelude where
>
>   import Prelude((:))
>
>     hd(x:xs) = x
>    ...
>
> The compiler complains of a syntax error occuring in the import
declaration:
> (unexpected symbol ":"). I may well be mistaken since i am somewhat new to
> haskell programming, but it seems to me that i ought to be able to
> explicitly import the list type constructor just like any other identifier

No, the cons operator has special status in H98 (in earlier version of
Haskell,
this wasn't the case); it is considered to be part of the syntax for lists,
just
like [] and [x1,x2] is. See the discussion of reservedops in Section 2.4 of
the report.

hth
--sigbjorn