Re: [ghc-steering-committee] Extra Commas (#87), Recommend: accept

I agree with Chris, the ergonomic benefits to allowing a leading/trailing comma would be substantial. It would be nice if we had smart, structure-aware editors that made it easy to swap around sequence elements, but they never really caught on. Most people still use line-oriented editors, so I think we should support the more line-oriented editing flow that extra commas enable. It's unfortunate that the extension would conflict with TupleSections, but I don't think that's sufficient reason to block it. I'm in favor of accepting the proposal. On Sat, Aug 4, 2018, at 16:08, Iavor Diatchki wrote:

I find the "cleaner diffs" or "easier editing" motivations to be very weak, and I'd rather not have to explain why `[1,2,]` is a list, but `(1,2,)` is a function.

On Sat, Aug 4, 2018 at 9:31 PM Christopher Allen wrote:

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Qualifying what I said toward the end, I don't think we should encourage clutter either. Trailing commas is an ergonomic idea that is already getting proved out by another language community.

On Sat, Aug 4, 2018 at 1:27 PM, Christopher Allen wrote:

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I've been using Rust which has terminal commas in the syntactic enumerations and it's, frankly, lovely. Less editing and easier copy/paste or use of macros when I am munging code. If it seems sloppy to you, it's probably because you aren't accustomed to it.

We have to remember that we work with code and not sentential English. In my view, mechanical ease should take priority over apparent naturalness. There have been many people who've objected that Haskell function application syntax is unnatural because they are accustomed to C-style f(arg, arg1) syntax.

Cf. https://medium.com/@nikgraf/why-you-should-enforce-dangling-commas-for-multi...

I'd like to see this get in unless there are real technical issues blocking it. I don't think it's our place to block an optional extension on aesthetic grounds unless it was beyond the pale of what the language is or does. I don't see how an extension permitting extra commas would qualify.

On Sat, Aug 4, 2018 at 10:37 AM, Joachim Breitner wrote:

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Hi,

Am Samstag, den 02.06.2018, 13:04 -0700 schrieb Iavor Diatchki:

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Well, I think it is a bad idea. Obviously I don't think it has a huge impact on the language, but I think it encourages poor style, for very questionable befits. This is quite subjective, of course, but I think that this choice is at odds with Haskell's elegant surface syntax. We don't allow repeated punctuation in written prose,,,, why would we want in our programs?,,,

looks like there is some discussion needed here…

Cheers, Joachim

-- Joachim Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de http://www.joachim-breitner.de/

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-- Chris Allen Currently working on http://haskellbook.com

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