(Also, "head" and "tail" are function names in the Prelude, but I'll assume you meant to write "hd" and "tl" or something like that).
No, I overlooked that. Writing "hd" and "tl" would be opposite to my point! I think that "head:tail" is much more readable and much more informative than "x:xs".
Shadowing built-in names comes with it's own set of problems. (At least that's the opinion of the compiler writers that enable warnings about shadows by default.)
