I would prefer that a language syntax is designed to be good for users, even if that means it presents problems for implementors. You have not argued that these issues indicate bad design from the point of view of an application programmer. If you think about languages that have been designed to be easy to parse, are these really languages that you would want to use? Ian Zimmerman wrote:
itz> All this taken together, I mean, _really_, is the lexical itz> structure of Haskell a botch, or what?
Jon> No. Innovative. All the problems described in this thread reflect Jon> unwarranted assumptions inherited in emacs. It's plainly possible Jon> to parse Haskell, and not hard either.
First, parsing of a complete program (eg. by a compiler) is quite different from parsing a buffer that is being edited by a human. The latter is hard, even for fairly well-specified languages. Irregularities only make it harder.
Second, this argument would be easier to accept if there in fact were an equally innovative tool capable of providing all the editing goodies Emacs normally does, for Haskell. But I don't know of one, even now, 10 years or so after Haskell's birth.
--brian