[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANNOUNCE: Utrecht Haskell Compiler (UHC) -- first release

[Jason Dagit]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 9:45 PM, Miguel Mitrofanov
<miguelimo38 at yandex.ru> wrote:
>
> On 21 Apr 2009, at 04:59, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
>
>>
>> On 20 Apr 2009, at 10:12 pm, Miguel Mitrofanov wrote:
>>
>>> I disagree. First of all, UHC states explicitly that some features are
>>> not supported (and probably never would be). Secondly, it seems like almost
>>> nobody uses (n+k)-patterns,
>>
>> How can you possibly know that?
>
> I can't; that's why I've said "seems like".

Plus, there was a movement to ban them:
http://www.mail-archive.com/haskell@haskell.org/msg01261.html

All jesting aside, after I read article I was even less eager to use
them, and I never thought to use them in a real program anyway.

BUT, here is the real point of my reply:

To end this debate as to whether people really use them.  We have this
huge collection of source code called Hackage.  I bet that if someone
with haskell-src-ext experience sat down they could go through all of
package in an automated way and count the number of uses of n+k
patterns in source code that appears in the wild.

Jason