Is this a bug?

[Malcolm Wallace]

| On Tue, 13 Mar 2001, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
| > Interestingly enough, all of Hugs, nhc98, and hbc make the same
| > mistake.  Only ghc rejects the expression, correctly complaining that
| > the fixities do not match.
| 
| Why is this common? The language design seems to be correct
| and it's not hard to get the implementation right, surely?

Getting infix right is one of the hardest parts of parsing Haskell.
The main difficulty arises because fixities and priorities can be
declared in the source itself (local to definitions - indeed, fixity
can be declared /after/ the use of the symbol).  Most systems tend
to have a liberal parser, accepting all kinds of infix expression, then
later on, typically during renaming, they attempt to detect errors and
patch-up the expressions given the declared fixity that was in scope.

Hbc is the only system that actually changes its parsing rules
on-the-fly as it reads a fixity decl.  This is one reason why it is
interesting that hbc makes the same mistake as Hugs - it shows there
is a different mechanism/assumption at work.

The mistake arises because of the operator section.  After finding
the outermost operator, the system (at least in nhc98) simply treats
the whole of the rest of the expression as its argument, essentially
demoting the sectioned operator to zero priority.

Regards,
    Malcolm

P.S. Now fixed in nhc98.