In message <20080104170826.GA7601@matrix.chaos.earth.li> Duncan Coutts
spot the difference? Yeah, just white space. The completely blank line separates the paragraphs into two comments which haddock will treat differently from a single comment.
I think both your examples should be treated the same, although I don't know whether they should be treated as one or two comments.
Alistair, can you remind us why we need the ability to break paragraphs into multiple comments rather than a single comment? Or is it just that we need to be able to have a comment followed by a blank line and then code. eg blah blah
some code
into -- blah blah some code rather than: -- blah blah -- some code is that all? I think that so long as we can avoid generating spurious comment-next-to-code errors, the above distinction is irrelevant. We could avoid comment next to code errors by using an extra comment/blank state for blank lines trailing comments. They'd be transformed into comments but could transition to > bird track lines without a code-next-to-comment error. Perhaps I'll send a patch to implement that.
Invisible whitespace is generally ignored elsewhere in Haskell, e.g. when determining if a literate comment is next to a bird track, or after a \ starting a string gap, the rationale being that if you can't see a difference then there shouldn't be one.
I agree, whatever distinction might be necessary it should not be done on the basis of something that's invisible. Duncan