Hi,
I'm in the process of designing a little language inspired by Haskell
but imperative, and have hit an issue regarding infix syntax which may
be of interest also to anyone thinking about future revisions of Haskell
or the problem of consistent parameter order in libraries.
I'm wondering if anyone can shed light on the reason why
x # y
gets desugared to
(#) x y
and not
(#) y x
since the first desugaring always seems to lead to (#) having to be
defined in a way that is unnatural for functional programming. This is
why a lot of functions in the standard libraries have their arguments
the wrong way round. For example in Data.Bits we have:
shiftL :: a -> Int -> a
whereas the natural argument order for a functional language would be to
make it so that in an application one has the verb first followed by the
noun as in:
shiftL' :: Int -> a -> a
so we could write (shiftL' 3) to denote the operation of shifting
something left by 3 eg:
let
shiftLeftByThree = shiftL' 3
in
map shiftLeftByThree [10, 78, 99, 102]
(This choice of argument order is explained at
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Parameter_order )
Similarly, considering arithmetic, it would make a lot more sense to me
to define:
x - y === (-) y x
since the "action" here is "take away y" and the noun is "x" so the
natural functional reading of (-) a b is "subtract a from b".
To be consistent this would also have to apply to the use of (->) in
types to get:
a -> b === (->) b a
Can anyone think of an example where the current desugaring of infix
arguments gives the correct order when the function is used in a postfix
application? (apart from commutative functions of course!)
Thanks,
Brian
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