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Comment by tromp | Hacker News Reader

Lisp has the minimal syntax for lists:

    (a b c d)

where other languages require separating commas, but Haskell has minimal syntax for function application:

     f x y z

with no parenthesis needed. (Technically, this is a triple application ((f x) y) z, masked by the convention of application being a left-associative binary operator.)

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Right, Haskell's function application syntax is more "minimal" that Lisp's, at least in the simple case.

But golergka said that Lisp's syntax is the clearest, not the smallest. And while that's probably something that depends on one's knowledge and past experience, I think there's something to it. The parens mean that it's unambiguous, and there is very little work on the reader's part to figure out where an expression begins and ends.

There's no operator precedence to keep in mind, no special whitespace rules, etc. It's about as minimal as you can get while still being completely explicit about syntactic constructs.

That is "minimally punctuated syntax". What we want is a "minimal correspondence between written syntax and the AST"; that is what is really meant by "Lisp has minimal syntax".

What you have there is loaded with ambiguity that has to be resolved by semantics. And after the dust settles, you're left without variadic functions.

Partial evaluation and currying are very valuable techniques. They are still succinct if there is a visible, explicit partial application operator to denote a function that is constructed by binding arguments around an expression.

> but Haskell has minimal syntax for function application: > f x y z

The question is, is it the _only_ syntax that Haskell offers and that the full language is built upon?

How would you write f((x y)z) in Haskell?

f $ x y $ z

Basically, f $ x = f x and is applied with lowest operator precedence (0) and is right associative. Therefore, f $ x y $ z = f (x y $ z) = f((x y) z)

If by (x y) you mean x(y) then I would write it like this:

f (x y) z

f (x y z)

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