On Sun, 2007-09-09 at 15:09 +0200, Peter Verswyvelen wrote: > > Why? What is your application? In fact, alphanumeric identifiers are > > used as unary operators. > Why? Well, why are binary operators allowed and unary operators not? > Isn't that some kind of discrimination? In math, many many operators are > unary. Haskell allows creating binary operators. So I would understand > that Haskell supported neither binary nor unary operators, but prefering > one above the other just seems odd. Especially when coming from C++ and C#. > > My application? I'm teaching basic math to beginning video game > programmers, and I wanted to demonstrate the logic operators "not, and, > or, logical equivalence and implication" etc in Haskell, building them > from scratch. Since most programmers have symbol-phobia, I wanted to let > them play with the symbols for operators, with Haskell. E.g. \/, /\, > --> <--> ==> <==> for or, and, if/then, iff, logical implication, > logical equivalence, etc... I cannot do this for the "not" operator, > which is a bit annoying, but it's not a show stopper. > > > You can also use "special syntax" for having unary operators. E.g. > > > > (*) :: () -> a -> a > > > Nice trick :-) > > > There has been a long discussion whether the unary minus belongs to > > number literals or not. > > http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2006-September/017941.html > > Yes I read it... > > > I think that the benefits of prefix or postfix symbolic operators were > > not worth dispensing with the comfortable section syntax. > Well, that's personal I guess, but I would prefer the syntax (? / 100) > and (100 / ?), which is just a single extra character to type, and hence > allow unary operators, but hey, that's just me, the newbie ;-)
With enough insanity simulating infix operators should be no problem, http://www.informatik.uni-bonn.de/~ralf/publications/Quote.pdf _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
