On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, Jon Fairbairn wrote:
On 2006-07-13 at 02:29BST "Neil Mitchell" wrote:
Hi,
Are cool kids supposed to put the comma in front like this? Some cool kids do, some cool kids don't. Some do both, depending on their mood.
The advantage of a leading , is that now the comma's line up, and if you want to add an item on the end of a list
[a ,b ,c ]
It's just a one line change, whereas with the comma after, you'd have to change the previous line as well - which is more effort and gives more noise in the darcs copy.
This is one of my pet hates. First, people find things easier to read if they are in a form that they have encountered lots of times before (in addition to psycho-visual factors). I'd like to think that Haskell programmers read a lot of literature (and since they should have started reading this long before they learnt to programme, and continue so to read, they're going to have read more literature than code). So for me (and anyone else moderately literate) a list written
[a, b, c ]
Optimal notation of lists, because of most easiest editing, is a: b: c: [] =B-]