[mercury-users] There's nowt so boring as writing thesis

[Andrew Bromage]

G'day all.

Tyson Dowd wrote:

> IMHO Mercury syntax is more taxing on the writer than the reader.
> Sometimes things are a little time-consuming to write, but on
> reading it's quite clear what is what, because the syntax makes it
> pretty clear.

This is very true, the majority of the time.

> Haskell syntax is reversed.

Not for an APL hacker. :-)

It's reversed in direction compared to the way that you tend to design
most programs, yes.  I suspect more people might use functional
languages if you put functions together in Unix pipe order rather than
function application order; which is precisely what monad syntax gives
you, really.

> I have found myself very lost in medium
> size Haskell programs that I wrote myself a few weeks before.
> 
> (It might just be a matter of experience).

Personally, I've never noticed this, except in those (rare) cases where
I've indulged in user-defined operators.

(Not to knock the principle of user-defined operators if used sensibly.
However I think the argument for them is much stronger in a language
like Haskell as opposed to Mercury precisely because you use combinators
so much, whereas in Mercury you're more likely to use the (,) operator.
See also Tom Conway's comments on parser combinators.)

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage