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Dollar

Posted on Saturday, 31 May 2008 at 15:18.

It occurred to me that the $ operator in Haskell is often seen as low-priority function application:

($) :: (a -> b) -> a -> b
f $ x = f x

But looking closely at the type, it just occurred to me that you can equally well see the $ operator as the identitify function on function types, because the type can be read as:

($) :: (a -> b) -> (a -> b)
($) = id

So if ($) is id, why do we need a more restrictive type? Maybe this will work too:

($) :: a -> a
($) = id

Let’s see:

> head $ [1..]
1
> (5 $)
5
> map ($ 5) [(+ 1), (* 2)]
[6,10]
> map (`id` 5) [(+ 1), (* 2)]
[6,10]

Yup!

This still leaves the question of why ($) has a type more restrictive than ‘necessary’. What good could it do? I had a small discussion about this on #haskell. We came up with the following explanations:

If you have any answers, I’d love to hear them.

Comments

By Douglas McClean on Sunday, 28 February 2010 at 06:04:

Similarly, I was surprised recently to learn that (.) is just fmap for the reader (aka ((->) e)) monad. I assume that the first and second proposed reasons (better documentation, possibly better error messages in some cases) are the reasons for the more restrictive type for (.) :: (b -> c) -> (a -> b) -> (a -> c) as well.

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