What is the difference between . (dot) and $ (dollar sign)?

Question

What is the difference between the dot (.) and the dollar sign ($)?

As I understand it, they are both syntactic sugar for not needing to us

Answer 1

One application that is useful and took me some time to figure out from the very short description at learn you a haskell: Since:

f $ x = f x

and parenthesizing the right hand side of an expression containing an infix operator converts it to a prefix function, one can write ($ 3) (4+) analogous to (++", world") "hello".

Why would anyone do this? For lists of functions, for example. Both:

map (++", world") ["hello","goodbye"]`

and:

map ($ 3) [(4+),(3*)]

are shorter than map (\x -> x ++ ", world") ... or map (\f -> f 3) .... Obviously, the latter variants would be more readable for most people.