Applicative style for infix operators?

Question

Is there a way to make applicative uses of <$> and <*> look nice when dealing with infix operators? I think that

((++) <$> a <*> ((++) <$> b <*> c ))

looks much more cluttered then

a ++ b ++ c

so I wonder if there is a nicer way.

Howard

If they are all the same operator, you could use foldr1 (liftA2 (++)) [a, b, c]. – Immunoreaction

Answer 1

(<++>) = liftA2 (++)
a <++> b <++> c

or

liftA2 (++) a $ liftA2 (++) b c

Overscrupulous

yup - add another pair of angle brackets. – Instrumentation

Answer 2

See Thomas Davie's InfixApplicative package, which provides a general syntactic trick, rather than having to define a new operator for each lifting.

Hugues

The documentation is a bit mangled. I think the OP's example would translate as a <^(++)^> (b <^(++)^> c) --- can you confirm/deny? – Mikaela

Answer 3

SHE lets you write

(|a ++ (|b ++ c|)|)

if that's any use. Of course, there's some overhead to introducing a preprocessing layer.

Selfconsistent