"Brian Hulley"
You can't be serious. This would cause far more problems than the current rule.
Why? Surely typing one tab is better than having to hit the spacebar 4 (or 8) times?
What you type depends on your editor. I hit tab, and the editor inserts an appropriate number of spaces. (I thought all editors did this now?)
There was an example posted on another thread where someone had got into confusion by using ; after a let binding in a do construct with an explicit brace after the 'do' but not after the 'let' (sorry I can't find it again).
If you allow {- everything becomes a lot more complicated and who needs them anyway?
Multi line comments are nice for commenting out blocks of code. It is much less intrusive, in particular if you're using version control.
back to editing a function at the top of a file. Things like {- would mean that all the parse trees for everything after it would have to be discarded. Also, flashing of highlighting on this scale could be very annoying for a user, so I'd rather just delete this particular possibility of the user getting annoyed when using my software :-)
Couldn't your editor just be a little bit smarter? E.g. count the {-s and -}s, and only comment-hilight them if there are two of them? Retain a history of old parse trees, so that it is quick to return to a previous one?
Haskell, which in turn might lead to more people understanding and therefore using the language, more libraries, more possibilities for
You forget one thing: "Avoid success at all costs" :-) -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants