[Haskell-cafe] Richer (than ascii) notation for haskell source?
tux_rocker at reinier.de
Wed May 14 13:20:14 EDT 2008
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Op 14-mei-2008, om 15:43 heeft Patrick Surry het volgende geschreven:
> It would be nice to be able to use a richer set of symbols in your
> source code for operators and functions (e.g. integral, sum, dot
> and cross-product, …), as well as variables (the standard upper
> and lower-case greek for example, along with things like super- and
> sub-scripting, bold/italic and what-not). You could imagine ending
> up with source code that reads just like a mathematical paper.
People have already thought about this, and it partly works already
in GHC. See http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/
I don't like, however, the tendency of many Haskell authors to use
math-like variable names. There are far to many Haskell programs
where you rarely find a variable name of more than three letters, and
all those variables that have more than one letter are English names
for Greek letters like 'phi' or 'mu'.
It makes a difference for your style whether you are just talking to
humans (a math paper) or to humans and compilers at the same time (a
computer program). When talking to a compiler, the compiler is not
interested in the semantical explanations, so programmers mostly
leave them out. But when you do that, you must make sure that the
formal language is still comprehensible to humans - I'd say by using
descriptive variable names.
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