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List:       haskell-cafe
Subject:    Re: [Haskell-cafe] mathematical notation and functional programming
From:       Jorge Adriano Aires <jadrian () mat ! uc ! pt>
Date:       2005-01-28 23:11:50
Message-ID: 200501282311.50541.jadrian () mat ! uc ! pt
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> Things I'm unhappy about are for instance
>
> f(x) \in L(\R)
>    where f \in L(\R) is meant
>
> F(x) = \int f(x) \dif x
>    where x shouldn't be visible outside the integral
>
> O(n)
>    which should be O(\n -> n) (a remark by Simon Thompson in
>                                The Craft of Functional Programming)
> f(.)
>    which means \x -> f x or just f

All of these are the same notation abuse,
"sometimes f x is meant to be interpreted as \x->f x"

In some cases it would be really tedious to add the extra lambdas, so the 
expression used in its definition is used to denote the function itself. 

> a < b < c
>    which is a short-cut of a < b \land b < c

Both, ambiguity and complex notation, can lead to (human) parsing problems, 
which is what we are trying to minimise here.

J.A.

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