Re: patch applied (haskell-prime-status): proposal: remove string gaps

Henrik Nilsson wrote:

...

Mon Mar 31 15:26:03 PDT 2008 Simon Marlow * proposal: remove string gaps

Hm. This has escaped me.

Not surprising - it wasn't discussed anywhere else, I just thought I should bring it up as a possibility to consider.

I don't find the rationale as documented on the Wikipage

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/RemoveStringGaps

very convincing at all. I've thus added a few more cons:

* string gaps are sometimes really helpful for formatting/pretty printing code neatly; the ++ alternative often necessecitates additional bracketing

I can't say I've ever run into that, but I can see how it might be an issue.

* the simplification of the lexical syntax is very minor

* arguably, the syntax highlighting ought to be fixed as that's what at fault, not the language as such

The point was that if we can make simplifications that make the life of tool writers easier, then all other things being equal we should do so. I wonder if I should suggest removing all those strange ascii esacpe sequences next... Cheers, Simon