<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" ><tr><td valign="top" style="font: inherit;">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!".<br><br>--- On <b>Fri, 9/18/09, Jon Fairbairn <i><jon.fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk></i></b> wrote:<br><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;"><br>From: Jon Fairbairn <jon.fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk><br>Subject: [Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell-beginners] map question<br>To: haskell-cafe@haskell.org<br>Date: Friday, September 18, 2009, 2:09 AM<br><br><div class="plainMail">Ketil Malde <<a ymailto="mailto:ketil@malde.org" href="/mc/compose?to=ketil@malde.org">ketil@malde.org</a>> writes:<br><br>> Gregory Propf <<a ymailto="mailto:gregorypropf@yahoo.com"
href="/mc/compose?to=gregorypropf@yahoo.com">gregorypropf@yahoo.com</a>> writes:<br>><br>>> Heh, perhaps we should petition to have a new computer key and symbol<br>>> added to the world's way of writing maths, something like maybe a<br>>> downward angled slash to mean prefix (-) <br>><br>> Or just use 'negate' and 'subtract'?<br><br>Well, now that ghc accepts unicode characters in programme source, we<br>could ask that ¬ (NOT SIGN, U+00AC) be recategorised as an identifier<br>character and use that (as a simple function name) for negation and lose<br>the wart altogether.<br><br>class Negatable t where<br> ¬ :: t -> t<br><br>(and as a side effect we could have identifiers like slightly¬dodgy).<br><br>Or, if we want to make things look even nicer, make ‐ (HYPHEN, U+2010)<br>an identifier character and use − (MINUS SIGN, U+2212) for the infix<br>operator. Now we could have
hyphenated‐identifiers too.<br><br>I think this second option would be the ㊣ (CORRECT, U+32A3) thing to<br>do, though editors and so on would have to be changed to make the<br>distinction readily visible.<br><br>I think it's Friday, but I'm not entirely sure this is silly.<br><br>-- <br>Jón Fairbairn <a ymailto="mailto:Jon.Fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk" href="/mc/compose?to=Jon.Fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk">Jon.Fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk</a><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>Haskell-Cafe mailing list<br><a ymailto="mailto:Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org" href="/mc/compose?to=Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org">Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org</a><br><a href="http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe" target="_blank">http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe</a><br></div></blockquote></td></tr></table><br>