6 ms·

I wonder if anyone is working on a full rework of Haskell's syntax, a la Facebook's Reason for OCaml? I'm a big fan of the semantics but not as much the syntax

by cfallin 10y ago

I wonder if anyone is working on a full rework of Haskell's syntax, a la Facebook's Reason for OCaml? I'm a big fan of the semantics but not as much the syntax of Haskell, too, and it would be interesting to see what a more... current-day-mainstream... syntax (Rust-like braces-and-semicolons-expression-based-language style, perhaps) would do for it.

akhilcacharya 10y ago
This would be absolutely amazing actually.
- platz 10y ago
  Wait till you see a rust-style datatype polymorphic over 4 parameters, and use that type over and over again. Haskell syntax may not make much sense coming from algol-inspired syntax, but to express its patterns it makes sense otherwise you end up with scala type lambda madness. Both purescript and agda have this
  - cfallin 10y ago
    I'm curious, what sorts of issues arise with complex types that Haskell-like syntax handles better? (Genuinely curious here -- I've written a little Haskell but am by no means an expert...) IMHO a Rust-style type `Option<HashMap<String, Vec<u32>>>` is a little noiser than the Haskell-style type `Maybe (Map String [Int])`, but not fatally so. Maybe there are much worse cases though?
    - ryani 10y ago
      The big one is `->`; all the 'template argument'-inspired syntaxes for this are terrible. Once you realize you want operators (and polymorphic operators, at that!) in your types, the `<u32>`syntax falls apart. I am not a fan of C#'s `Func<a,b>` at all.
DanWaterworth 10y ago
This is what I'm doing with plastic [1], though it also has some semantic differences: strict instead of lazy, monads become objects. [1] https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/plastic https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/plastic
- taylorfausak 10y ago
  That doesn't compile to Haskell.
  - DanWaterworth 10y ago
    I'm surprised that you expected it to. edit: Having looked at Reason more closely, I now see where the confusion came from. Sorry, I didn't mean to deceive you.
chriswarbo 10y ago
There was Liskell, but unfortunately it seems to be unmaintained :(
iso-8859-1 10y ago
https://github.com/lamdu/lamdu https://github.com/lamdu/lamdu

by cfallin 10y ago

akhilcacharya 10y ago

This would be absolutely amazing actually.

platz 10y ago
Wait till you see a rust-style datatype polymorphic over 4 parameters, and use that type over and over again. Haskell syntax may not make much sense coming from algol-inspired syntax, but to express its patterns it makes sense otherwise you end up with scala type lambda madness. Both purescript and agda have this
- cfallin 10y ago
  I'm curious, what sorts of issues arise with complex types that Haskell-like syntax handles better? (Genuinely curious here -- I've written a little Haskell but am by no means an expert...) IMHO a Rust-style type `Option<HashMap<String, Vec<u32>>>` is a little noiser than the Haskell-style type `Maybe (Map String [Int])`, but not fatally so. Maybe there are much worse cases though?
  - ryani 10y ago
    The big one is `->`; all the 'template argument'-inspired syntaxes for this are terrible. Once you realize you want operators (and polymorphic operators, at that!) in your types, the `<u32>`syntax falls apart. I am not a fan of C#'s `Func<a,b>` at all.

DanWaterworth 10y ago

This is what I'm doing with plastic [1], though it also has some semantic differences: strict instead of lazy, monads become objects. [1] https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/plastic https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/plastic

taylorfausak 10y ago
That doesn't compile to Haskell.
- DanWaterworth 10y ago
  I'm surprised that you expected it to. edit: Having looked at Reason more closely, I now see where the confusion came from. Sorry, I didn't mean to deceive you.

chriswarbo 10y ago

There was Liskell, but unfortunately it seems to be unmaintained :(

iso-8859-1 10y ago

https://github.com/lamdu/lamdu https://github.com/lamdu/lamdu