Haskell infix syntax

[Tomek Sowiński]

bearophile bearophile napisał:

> Haskell is full of function calls, so the Haskell designers have used/invented several different ways to avoid some parenthesys in the code.
> 
> From what I've seen if you remove some parenthesis well, in the right places, the resulting code is less noisy, more readable, and it has less chances to contain a bug (because syntax noise is a good place for bugs to hide).
> 
> One of the ways used to remove some parenthesys is a standard syntax that's optionally usable on any dyadic function (function with two arguments):
> 
> sum a b = a + b
> 
> sum 1 5 == 1 `sum` 5
> 
> The `name` syntax is just a different way to call a regular function with two arguments.
> 
> In Haskell there is also a way to assign an arbitrary precedence and associativity to such infix operators, but some Haskell programmers argue that too much syntax sugar gives troubles ( http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Use_of_infix_operators ).
> 
> In D the back tick has a different meaning, and even if in D you use a different syntax, like just a $ prefix, I don't know how much good this syntax is for D:
> 
> int sum(int x, int y) { return x + y; }
> 
> int s = sum(1, sum(5, sum(6, sum(10, 30))));
> Equals to (associativity of $ is fixed like this):
> int s = 1 $sum 5 $sum 6 $sum 10 $sum 30;
> 
> So I think it's not worth adding to D.

I vaguely recall someone mentioned infixablility by naming convention.

int _add_(int x, int y);

int s = 1 _add_ 5 _add_ 10;

As a feature of its own, it's just sugar. But if introducing infix operators were contingent on banishing classic operator overloading, then it is worthwhile.

-- 
Tomek