[Haskell-cafe] Records (was Re: [Haskell] Improvements to GHC)

[Jon Fairbairn]

On 2005-11-17 at 13:21EST Cale Gibbard wrote:
> Sebastian Sylvan wrote:
> 
> >Personally I think that the dot is way to good of a symbol to be
> >"wasted" on function composition. I mean, how often do you really use
> >function composition in a way which doesn't obfuscate your code? I use
> >($) way more often than (.). Some people do use it more often than I
> 
> Function composition is a very important and fundamental operation on
> functions, and I use it all the time. Haskell is supposed to be a
> functional language. I'd vote against any motion to make it less
> convenient.

Hear hear.

> Of course, it really shouldn't be (.) but a small circle
> centred on the line, which isn't on ordinary keyboards. (°) looks
> closer, but is much less convenient to type. (I need to type
> "<Compose> 0 ^" in order to get that character.) Spelling it as (.)
> really is the best easy-to-type approximation.

Ought to be ∘, unicode 0x2218, but without defining some
keyboard macros, that's even harder to type. On the other
hand, I could define ctrl-. as (ucs-insert "2218"), and then
it would be no harder to type than >. 



-- 
Jón Fairbairn                              Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk