On 7/02/2012, at 1:41 PM, AntC wrote: > Richard, now you're just being playful.
"Half fun and full earnest." I *do* regard 'field OF record' as far more readable, intuitive, &c than 'record.field'. With the number of meanings '.' already has in Haskell, I *do* regard any attempt to overload it for field access as deeply problematic and likely in practice to push much Haskell code over the readability event horizon. Anyone who has had occasion to write Fortran in the last 20+ years has had to discover just how quickly you can get used to using 'record%field'. I'm not really a COBOL programmer, but Prolog and Erlang and Smalltalk taught me well that '.' in a programming language can perfectly well mean exactly what it means in English: end of statement. I just do not buy the idea that the connection between dot and field access is anything more than a habit of mind engendered by a few languages or that it should be respected any more than the habit of using a(i) -- Fortran, Simula 67, Ada, Dijkstra's notation, PL/I -- or a[i] -- Algol 60, Algol 68, Pascal, C and its horde of delirious imitators -- for array access. The idea of using #field for a field access function has of course an appeal to people familiar with ML or Erlang. The connection with ML is very close. # is already used. I rather like field¶ record ([the] field[part] [of] record), with the ¶ Pilcrow reminding me of Part. Following ML, we could perfectly well allow 3¶ as well, meaning "field 3 of any tuple that _has_ a field 3, the type to be resolved by context". _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
