argument order of functions in Data.Bits

[John Meacham]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 08:54:09AM +0200, 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).

Ah, This has bothered me too. I vote for the change... 
        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈