Thanks for examining the proposals. All in all I don't think improving this bit of syntax would actually mean this much, it's only worth considering when you st

Thanks for examining the proposals. All in all I don't think improving this bit of syntax would actually mean this much, it's only worth considering when you start a new language from scratch. But the records names / TDNR issue, this makes a real difference, I'll definitely take a look at Frege if I'll need functional programming on the JVM ...as Scala just seems too scary for me. Now, about what I proposed above, I meant the two examples as different cases of the same syntax, newlines should not really make a difference until after the "=". So you'd use the second variant for pattern matching: myFunctionFoo :: Int -> Int -> Int -> Int : 1 b c = 1984 - c : a b c = 2*a + 3*b + 4*c But it's probably better to direct your effort elsewhere. I see that even Typed Clojure prefers to repeat the name of a symbol instead of bothering to rearrange everything else just to avoid this repetition. ...and it's probably not worth spoiling the beauty of the ML-style-syntax for this. I admit it, I find it 10x easier to read either Lisps or C-syntax-like languages than MLs, but there is a beauty in the ML way, and math folks seem to love it, so better keep it that way :)