On Monday 07 January 2002 1:22 am, Tom Bevan wrote:
On Sat, 2002-01-05 at 05:03, Zhanyong Wan wrote:
Hi,
Ashley Yakeley wrote: | The "layout" rules drive me nuts. You might prefer using parentheses | and semicolons, as I do:
I guess the point behind the layout rules is that anything violating such rules is considered bad programming style. I agree that Haskell compilers/interpreters should give more helpful error messages though (e.g. adding something like "Do you mean to align 'foo' with 'bar'?").
- Zhanyong
Here here. I think that the poor compiler error messages in Haskell are a very major hurdle to learning the language.
Which compiler are you talking about? Bad error messages are not a valid critisism of the Haskell Language IMHO. I think the error messages produced by ghc are pretty good myself (though it's not very helpful wrt to syntax errors I must admit, but they're easy to find and fix anyway). As for prefering {;} to layout, that's just daft. I don't think I've ever had a layout related error. Not one. But I get plenty of errors caused by incorrect nesting of {} or missing ; in C (unless I layout the code properly of course :-) Regards -- Adrian Hey