On Sun, 9 Sep 2007, Peter Verswyvelen wrote:
Henning Thielemann wrote:
The more syntactic constructs exist, the more complicated it becomes to
read such programs. Today, if you read a symbolic operator which is not
"-", not a single dot with a capital identifier to the left
(qualification), not a double dot in a bracket (enumeration) and not
enclosed in parentheses (prefix mode), then it is an infix operator. Note
the already existing exceptions, and I feel these are not complete. With
prefix operators it becomes more difficult.
Okay, so the choice was to enhance readability. Yes, something can be said
for that, because in C++ and C#, operator overloading is a no-go in general,
in those language, it is prefered to use clear and long function names. But
as Haskell seemed more math-mind oriented, I was just wandering why unary
operator support was missing. Since students will surely ask me why I can't
create a symbolic operator for the "not" function, I now have a good answer
ready ;-)
I have read about APL that it uses a special character set in order to get
a more mathematical looking notation. Maybe your students should check out
this language?
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