Visual Haskell: A First Attempt

This paper presents the Visual Haskell language. Visual Haskell is intended as i) a means of visualising Haskell programs, and ii) as a complementary programming notation to standard Haskell. The syntax of Visual Haskell is speciied by rst giving a translation from Haskell into an intermediate, textual form; the visual syntax is then speciied as a direct translation from the intermediate form into visual representations. Visual Haskell is kept as close to Haskell as possible, in the hope that it could be used in a \two-view" programming system. Several examples of function deenitions illustrate how Visual Haskell looks and is used. Visual Haskell is incomplete, lacking syntax for modules, type declarations, type classes and instances, arrays, and user-deened operators. These are seen as temporary omissions rather than insurmountable drawbacks.