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 <[email protected]> wrote: From: Jon Fairbairn <[email protected]> Subject: [Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell-beginners] map question To: [email protected] Date: Friday, September 18, 2009, 2:09 AM Ketil Malde <[email protected]> writes: > Gregory Propf <[email protected]> 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 [email protected] _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
_______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
