Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: layout problem

On Thursday 17 November 2005 03:44, Cale Gibbard wrote:

On 16/11/05, Stefan Monnier wrote:

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Indeed! I always use braces and semicolons with do-notation. You are free to do so too! Nothing requires you to use layout. Indeed, you can freely mix the two.

I would not recommend braces and semicolons, because these allow a bad layout (easy to parse for a compiler, but hard to read for a human), unless you invest the time to make a tidy layout despite the braces and semicolons. (So why not only make a tidy layout?)

Unless you use a simplistic text editor, the braces and semi-colons allow the text editor to do the layout for you. While I find the layout notation attractively clean, I find the redundancy of autolayout+braces+semicolons to save me from a lot of trouble.

If your editor is a little smarter still, it can do the Haskell layout without braces automatically too. The emacs mode helps with this. Yi/hIDE should be able to do it perfectly once it's in a generally usable state. :)

Hmm, how would your super intelligent text editor layout the ambigous example of the OP? Well, never mind: either way might be the wrong one, depending on what the program is /supposed/ to do. Ben