I have to agree (although I suspect few others will :))
matt
On 11/02/2005, at 1:23 AM, Jan-Willem Maessen wrote:
On Feb 10, 2005, at 6:50 AM, Henning Thielemann wrote:
On Thu, 10 Feb 2005, [ISO-8859-1] Thomas Jäger wrote:
Altogether, the spirit of the page seems to be "use as little
syntactic sugar as possible" which maybe appropriate if it is aimed
at
newbies, who often overuse syntactic sugar (do-notation).
This overuse is what I observed and what I like to reduce. There are
many
people advocating Haskell just because of the sugar, which let
interested
people fail to see what's essential for Haskell. When someone says to
me
that there is a new language which I should know of because it
supports
definition of infix operators and list comprehension, I shake my head
and
wonder why he don't simply stick to Perl, Python, C++ or whatever.
If you're trying to avoid obscurity, why advocate point-free style?
I ask this question to be deliberately provocative; I'm not trying to
single you out in particular. So, to everybody: What's so great about
point-free style?
Is it really clear or obvious what
> map . (+)
means? Contrast this with
> \n -> map (+n)
or
> \n xs -> map (+n) xs
I submit that, while it is possible to develop a reading knowledge of
point-free style, non-trivial use of point-free
computations---compositions of functions with arity greater than 1, as
above, compositions of sections of composition or application, arrow
notation without the sugar, and so forth---will always be more
difficult to read and understand than the direct version. I submit
that this is true even if one is familiar with point-free programming
and skilled in its use.
Even something as simple as eta-reduction (as in the second and third
functions above) can seriously obscure the meaning of program code by
concealing the natural arity of a function.
-Jan-Willem Maessen
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
