Warp wrote:
>   [] is used almost universally for indexing in most languages

Well, most based on C syntax. The rest (Pascal, Fortran, Ada, etc) use ().

> data)). Is there a logical reason why Haskell chooses an odd syntax of
> "x ! y" for the same thing than most other languages express as "x[y]"?

I would guess it makes the thing into an infix operator, while x[y] is 
neither prefix, postfix, infix, or ... whatever.

Plus, list literals are [ ... ], so I'm guessing that x [ y ] is ambiguous 
as to whether you're calling function x with an argument htat's a 
one-element list containing y.

Now, why they picked ! instead of (say) @ is beyond me. "@" is what I've 
seen used in all the languages that make this strictly an infix operator.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The question in today's corporate environment is not
   so much "what color is your parachute?" as it is
   "what color is your nose?"

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