[Haskell-cafe] If you'd design a Haskell-like language, what would you do different?

[Jason Dagit]

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 3:10 PM, Chris Wong
<chrisyco+haskell-cafe at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 10:53 AM, Matthew Farkas-Dyck
> <strake888 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> With GHC 7.0.3:
>>
>> $ cat test.hs
>> class ℝ a where {
>>  test :: a;
>> };
>>
>> (∈) :: Eq a => a -> [a] -> Bool;
>> x ∈ (y:ys) = x == y || x ∈ ys;
>>
>> main = putStrLn "Two of three ain't bad (^_~)";
>> $ runhaskell test.hs
>> Two of three ain't bad (^_~)
>> $
>
> Why not expand it even further?

My experience with Agda makes me think that extending it further can
make it painful to program in.  Initially I thought that using unicode
symbols would just make input a bit slower and that editor support
could address that.  You know, like writing about math using latex.
My actual experience with Agda was different than that.

I was using Emacs and I found that I needed to make my font size very
large to see all the detail of the unicode symbols clearly enough to
distinguish between them fully.  The alternative was using the support
in emacs for displaying the codepoint, as a number, for any glyph I
wanted to distinguish.  Perhaps it's still "just an issue of editor
support" but it left a sour taste in my mouth.

Jason