Haskell symbols

If you've been bored enough to peek at any of my Haskell or Purescript code, you might have noticed a Helpers.hs file in multiple repos. These files contain convenience functions that vary from project to project, but a few symbols have consistently appeared in each one.

Haskell and Purescript are both symbol heavy already, and capable of parsing UTF-8, so I thought it made sense to make use of unicode symbols for common operators in my personal projects. I had just a few criteria:

1. The symbol has to kind of resemble its ASCII equivalent.
2. The symbol needs to be typeable through standard Vim digraphs.
3. The symbol has to look good in my terminal. Using ≫ for *> makes a lot of sense, but ≫ is really small in the default MacOS font for whatever reason. Maybe it'd look better under different settings, but I don't care enough to find out.

There are some obvious wins right off the bat, and they feature heavily in my articles already. A function

f :: Eq a => a -> a -> Bool

can be rewritten in unicode as

f ∷ Eq a ⇒ a → a → Bool

The digraphs for ∷, ⇒, and → are simply their ASCII equivalents.

In Purescript, forall can be rewritten as ∀, which is just the digraph FA.

I stretched things a bit further with some other symbols though.

-- Digraph 0.
f ⊙ g = f <$> g
infixl 4 ⊙

-- Digraph 0M
f ● g = f <*> g
infixl 4 ●

-- Digraph Tl
f ◁ g = fmap f . g
infixr 9 ◁

-- Digraph PL
f ◀ g = f <=< g
infixr 1 ◀

-- Digraph Dw
α ◇ ω = α <> ω
infixr 5 ◇

The first two entries are symbolic synonyms for <$> and <*>. I tried to keep things consistent by making the applicative darker in order to indicate its increased "power" over map. I could not find a suitable symbol for >>=, which is fine, because I already like the way that one looks.

This same "darker = more power" metaphor holds for ◁ and ◀, which are point free versions of fmap and >>= respectively. Interestingly enough, I don't think ◁ has an ASCII equivalent in Haskell, despite me using it all the time. I think these communicate flow quite well and can make tacit code surprisingly readable.

The only other symbol I introduced was ◇ to append stuff. The alternative operator <|> had no alternative. Thought there might be some kinda glyph in electrical engineering that covered that, but nothing in the standard Vim digraphs at least.

Guess I might also replace /= with ≠ if I had to, which is just the digraph !=. Probably wouldn't touch == though.

I took inspiration from Vasiliy Yorkin's Purescript symbols here, but rejected most of his choices for font reasons.

These are nice-ass symbols. I've been using them for a year+ now, and they still make sense to me when I go back to refactor old code. Give them a go.