- and + behave inconsistently

[Golden-Phy]

Quick Summary: Miss-formatting of an infix subtraction can lead to an interesting phenomena, where the first operand is interpreted as a function and the second as an argument, leading to the compiler saying that a number doesn't take that many arguments. Doing the same with + works fine though.
My assumption is that - is treated as unary operator, something that the + operator apparently doesn't support.

SSCCE

module Main exposing (..)

import Browser
import Html exposing (Html, div, text)

-- MAIN
main =
  Browser.sandbox { init = init, update = update, view = view }

-- UPDATE
update : () -> Model -> Model
update _ model =
  model

-- MODEL
type alias Model = ()

init : Model
init = ()

-- VIEW
view : Model -> Html ()
view model =
    div [] [text (String.fromInt(1 -1))]
--    div [] [text (String.fromInt(1 - 1))]
--    div [] [text (String.fromInt(1 +1))]
-- Example illustrating the interpretation of the compiler (at least for me)
--    div [] [text (String.fromInt(1 -1 * 2))]

• Elm: Playground on https://elm-lang.org/try as of 26/5/2024
• Browser: Mozilla Firefox for Fedora 123.0 (64)
• Operating System: Fedora 39

Additional Details

Compiler output:

TOO MANY ARGS
Jump to problem
This value is not a function, but it was given 1 argument.

24|     div [] [text (String.fromInt(1 -1))]

                                     ^
Are there any missing commas? Or missing parentheses?

[github-actions]

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[nopria]

I was thinking about adopting ELM for a project but the fact that basic issues like this one are not likely to be solved any time soon leads me to look for an alternative.

[qrzychu]

@nopria I am not a maintainer, but is the above really a blocking issue? just add space and it works.

I know it's technically a workaround, but it's fairly straghtforward.

It's not like it requires creating === to fix the real problem.

I guess it's just that +1 is an operator (1 |> (+)), while -1 is a number literal, which are logical IMO. Once you know that, you can just hop on and write your code. Fixing this is either treating -1 as 1 |> (-) everywhere or having a special case for just negative numbers.

Or you can add a space.

Aslo, what alternative did you land on?