[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell-beginners] map question

[Gregory Propf]

I actually meant it as sort of a joke but maybe it's not after all.  Among the many benefits, think of all the delightful conspiracy theories such a change would spawn - "even our math isn't safe now!", "Save the minus sign!".

--- On Fri, 9/18/09, Jon Fairbairn <jon.fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

From: Jon Fairbairn <jon.fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk>
Subject: [Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell-beginners] map question
To: haskell-cafe at haskell.org
Date: Friday, September 18, 2009, 2:09 AM

Ketil Malde <ketil at malde.org> writes:

> Gregory Propf <gregorypropf at yahoo.com> writes:
>
>> Heh, perhaps we should petition to have a new computer key and symbol
>> added to the world's way of writing maths, something like maybe a
>> downward angled slash to mean prefix (-)  
>
> Or just use 'negate' and 'subtract'?

Well, now that ghc accepts unicode characters in programme source, we
could ask that ¬ (NOT SIGN, U+00AC) be recategorised as an identifier
character and use that (as a simple function name) for negation and lose
the wart altogether.

class Negatable t where
      ¬ :: t -> t

(and as a side effect we could have identifiers like slightly¬dodgy).

Or, if we want to make things look even nicer, make ‐ (HYPHEN, U+2010)
an identifier character and use − (MINUS SIGN, U+2212) for the infix
operator. Now we could have hyphenated‐identifiers too.

I think this second option would be the ㊣ (CORRECT, U+32A3) thing to
do, though editors and so on would have to be changed to make the
distinction readily visible.

I think it's Friday, but I'm not entirely sure this is silly.

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

_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe



      
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20090918/a44f6e06/attachment.html