Editing Syntactic sugar/Cons (section)

=== Syntactic heroin ===

Compiler writers can only lose if they give way
to the insistence of users requesting more syntactic sugar.
Every user has his own preferred applications,
everyone has his taste
and everyone wants his special application and his taste to be respected in future language revisions.
Who is authorised to decide which application is general and which is too special?
Is it more important to have many syntactic alternatives
such that all people can write with their individual styles
or is it more important that code of several authors have homogenous appearance
such that it can be read by all people?

You can bet if new syntactic sugar arises
many users will rush at it and forget about the analytic expression
the special notation shall replace.
To argue against that is like trying to take the most beloved toy from children.

Every special notation leads to the question if it can be extended and generalised.
Guards are extended to [[pattern guard]]s and
[[list comprehension]] is generalised to [[parallel list comprehension]]
in current versions of Haskell compilers.
Infix notation for alphanumeric functions is already possible in Haskell98
but "lacks" the possibility to add arguments like in <hask>x `rel c` y</hask>.
The last is not implemented, but was already requested.
A solution using only Haskell98 infix operators is already
[http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2002-July/003215.html invented].
Further on, the more general [http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/mail-www/haskell/msg02005.html MixFix] notation was already proposed,
not to forget the silent lifting of map data structures to
[http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2002-October/010629.html functions],
[https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.4.4/docs/users_guide/exts/rebindable_syntax.html#postfix-operators postfix operators],
[[section of an infix operator|sections]] of
[http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2006-July/016683.html tuples], like <hask>(?,x,?)</hask>,
[http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2007-September/031544.html symbolic prefix operators].
What comes next?

Rodney Bates called the phenomena not only "syntactic sugar" but "[http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1071738 syntactic heroin]".
:(See also http://www.cs.wichita.edu/~rodney/languages/Modula-Ada-comparison.txt)
People start with a small dosis of syntactic sugar,
they quickly want more, because the initial dose isn't enough for ecstasy any longer.
If one drug no longer helps then stronger ones are requested.
It is so much tempting because the users requesting syntactic sugar
are not responsible for implementing it and
for avoiding inferences with other language features.