argument order of functions in Data.Bits

[Simon Marlow]

On 07 April 2005 07:54, Henning Thielemann wrote:

> The version of Data.Bits which is shipped with GHC-6.2 is marked as
> experimental. So changes in the API are still possible? :-]
> 
> My experiments suggest that the functions should have a different
> order of arguments. Many of the functions of this module alter some
> bits in a machine word, thus they can be considered as update
> functions and their type signature should end with a -> a. Then we
> could easily combine several operations this way
> 
>    shiftL 2 . clearBit 7 . setBit 4 . setBit 1
> 
> instead of
>    flip shiftL 2 . flip clearBit 7 . flip setBit 4 . flip setBit 1
> 
> or
>    (`shiftL` 2) . (`clearBit` 7) . (`setBit` 4) . (`setBit` 1)
> .
> 
> I don't see the benefit of urging the programmer to use infix notation
> instead of prefix notation here, e.g. (w `shift` 2) instead of 
> (shift 2 w).

On the whole I agree, but I'm inclined against changing this because it
would break so much code gratuitously.  I vote for just putting this
down to a small mistake in the original design, and leaving it.  If
there's overwhelming support for the change of course we'll make it, but
I doubt there will be.

Also the order of the arguments to shift matches C's shift operators
(although they are real infix operators, of course).

Cheers,
	Simon