> Why not make it look exactly like Haskell? So that every valid Haskell program is automatically a valid Hvm program, while the reverse need not hold due to hv

> Why not make it look exactly like Haskell? So that every valid Haskell program is automatically a valid Hvm program, while the reverse need not hold due to hvm being untyped. > I prefer the cleaner Haskell syntax. "Haskell syntax" is a pretty bad design in my experience. Firstly, it isn't just one thing: there's Haskell 98 and Haskell 2010, but most "Haskell" code uses alternative syntax from GHC extensions (lambda case, GADTs, type applications, view patterns, tuple sections, etc.). (Frustratingly, those extensions are often applied implicitly, via a separate .cabal file, which makes parsing even harder; plus lots of "Haskell code" is actually written as input for a pre-processor, in which case all bets are off!) GHC alone includes two separate representations of Haskell's syntax (one used by the compiler, one used by TemplateHaskell). Other projects tend to avoid both of them, in favour of packages like haskell-src-exts. I've worked on projects which manipulate Haskell code, and getting it to parse was by far the hardest step; once I'd managed to dump it to an s-expression representation the rest was easy!