Re: [pure-lang-users] null

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

John Cowan wrote:
> Scheme's Great Renaming did go with "null?" though.

Yes, I know, but Haskell is more relevant there because the basic list
operations in the Pure and libraries closely follow the Haskell prelude
(or the original edition of the Bird/Wadler book). OTOH, I really only
use the xyzp naming for type predicates, where typically xyz is already
used for construction operations, so there must be a way to distinguish
the two.

> Kind of a pity, I think,
> that you don't allow ? as an identifier character (at least at the end);
> that way all predicates could uniformly use it.

Like most languages (except Lisp), Pure distinguishes between
alphanumeric characters forming identifiers and punctuation forming
delimiters and operator symbols. That's just the way it is. It would be
rather odd if '?' would be declared an alphanumeric symbol, not the
right thing IMHO.

Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag