Hi,
1) it is impossible to explain the precise workings of the rule to a class of first years undergraduates
Then don't explain it to them. At York in the 3rd year Haskell course it is never explained in detail, I think it might be briefly mentioned in passing that some kind of indentation thing is used, but not focused on. I certainly don't have a clue what the rule is. I believe the Haskell rule is a superset of the Miranda (TM) one? If so just explain the Miranda one. I have a friend, who was programming Haskell for 3 years before he even realised that the indentation had an effect on the program! And not trivial stuff, he wrote a lot of big programs. If you just do sensible indentation, then it just works (TM). As for hugs complaining about semi-colons, thats just a bad error message - not a reason for a language change. Of course, your point about being overly complex is possibly true - but I don't think its possible to reduce the complexity without breaking existing programs, and I don't think its worth doing that. The one thing about having the offside rule which bugs me is that some people use tabs with 8 spaces (Haskell standard), others use 4 (me) and others use variable other sizes. This makes code 100% incompatible between different people. I would make it a warning to use a tab in a Haskell source file. Thanks Neil