Thoughts on Haskell

Re:Thoughts on Haskell by MaxGabriel on Saturday October 17, 2015 @02:26PM (#10405450)

    92 `div` 10

> I think this is pretty ugly, and it feels like it was glommed on to the language in some kind of compromise. For div specifically, you can use the operator / to achieve the same thing, but this won't work for all other functions.

I don't see what's wrong with backticks for infix functions; they highlight a change in fixity that makes it easier to see that `div` is being applied to the surrounding arguments rather than being used an an argument:

    a div b

    a `div` b

I'm not familiar with other languages that have support for named, infix functions. Are there better syntactic alternatives?

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Re:Thoughts on Haskell by chrisaycock on Saturday October 17, 2015 @04:21PM (#10405893)

> I'm not familiar with other languages that have support for named, infix functions. Are there better syntactic alternatives?

A "dyadic function" in q/kdb+'s .q namespace has a kind of Currying that accepts the right-hand value as the second argument to the function. (This is abusive in practice since the user should never add to the .q namespace as future conflicts are possible.)

  .q.add:{x+y}
  5 add 10

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Re:Thoughts on Haskell by marcosdumay on Saturday October 17, 2015 @04:24PM (#10405901)

I also take issue with this part:

> you can use the operator / to achieve the same thing, but this won't work for all other functions

Yes, it will work for all other (binary) functions. If there isn't an operator at the Preface, just declare one.

Anyway, I'll have to agree with people further down. Using the grave accent as a stand-alone symbol in a language is a big mistake.

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Re:Thoughts on Haskell by spion on Saturday October 17, 2015 @02:36PM (#10405501)

I think its the backquotes. For a time I thought that

  a :div: b

would look better, but now that I'm used to the backquotes, I'm not so sure.

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Re:Thoughts on Haskell by evincarofautumn on Saturday October 17, 2015 @02:40PM (#10405514)

Yeah, grave accents are not exactly designed to be used as quote characters.

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Re:Thoughts on Haskell by MaxGabriel on Saturday October 17, 2015 @03:05PM (#10405615)

They're commonly used as such in several programming languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent#Use_in_programmin...), though, including Bash, D, Go, Ruby, MySQL, Markdown, etc.

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Re:Thoughts on Haskell by evincarofautumn on Saturday October 17, 2015 @03:37PM (#10405742)

I don’t like them here or there. I don’t like them anywhere.

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