On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 7:23 PM, Richard Eisenberg
Thanks for volunteering to do this work, but I'm afraid now is a terrible time to do it. I know of three significant patches that are about to be committed, and your reformatting would cause quite a few merge conflicts. If there is a lull between a feature freeze and a ghc-8.0 fork, that would be the ideal time, to my mind.
Ok, I'll shelve the idea until further notice.
That said, I remain unconvinced that a rigid commitment to 80-char lines is in our best interest. My personal vote is to continue to have 80 characters as a guideline but to keep the current practice of allowing programmer discretion.
In my case it's not so much discretion, but that in the absence of clear guidance, I default to conservatively trying to do whatever the file already does. So there's a bit of contradiction where the local convention says to do one thing but lint says another, and without a tie-breaker I'd go with local convention. In which case best to turn off the lint, and put a guideline in the doc. Also I had no idea about the under_scores means private thing, I just picked what seemed to be prevalent in the surroundings. That would be another good thing to put into https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/CodingStyle