On Fri, Feb 18, 2005 at 09:21:00PM +0100, Dmitri Pissarenko wrote:
I'm curious what experienced Haskellers think about using literate Haskell in daily work.
This isn't a deep answer, but I find both of Haskell's literate syntaxes more trouble than they're worth. The leading "> " syntax makes a lot of editor operations (joining lines, changing indentation) more cumbersome, and it takes away two characters that every-so-often come in handy at the end of a line. The LaTeX syntax is too verbose unless you're really writing LaTeX (so I'm sure for papers it's great). I do use a literate style sometimes, but I just use ordinary comments for it. As far as I'm concerned, the psychology of having comments be the default mode is not worth the minor annoyance it causes me. I use vim, which can handle free-form text with a comment leader very well, but probably isn't flexible enough to make writing code with a leader as comfortable as without. Andrew