[Haskell] is $ a no-op?

[Graham Klyne]

At 15:55 13/10/04 +0200, Johannes Waldmann wrote:
>In a *lot* of places in my programs,
>I am using notation   f $ g $ h x  in favour of  f (g (h x))
>(that's the  '$'  as defined in  the Prelude:
>right-associating infix application operator)
>as it avoids parentheses, and makes the code more manageable
>(you can write "(upward) pipes" with one "$ f" per line, etc)
>
>I liked to think of it as just a syntactical convention (for years ...)
>but is it really at no cost? It does introduce extra function calls,
>that is, extra closures etc.? Can these be removed by ghc's optimizer?

I don't think it's *just* a syntactic convention, but in your case above I 
think they both yield the same function graph for evaluation so I see no 
cost there.

Here's a little $-based idiom I rather like, which shows $ as more than 
just a no-op:

[[
-- |Apply list of functions to some value, returning list of results.
--  It's kind of like an converse map.
--
--  This is similar to the 'ap' function in the Monad library.
--
flist :: [a->b] -> a -> [b]
flist fs a = map ($ a) fs
]]

I suppose you could say that $ is a kind of syntactic convention, because 
without it juxtaposition for function application lacks the lexical 
visibility for expression in different syntactic contexts.

>Or am I totally wrong here ... Actually, looking at the Prelude (now),
>there is '$!' as well - is that supposed to answer my question?

Well, that's a different function, I think.

#g


------------
Graham Klyne
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