I would like to suggest a different change to single line comment syntax to do two things. First, address an inconsistency with multi line comments, and secondly remove one of the main sources of confusion for beginners. My proposal is to make any text beginning '--' a comment (rather than requiring a space after the two dashes. I appreciate that the argument against this is that various operators that look like this are useful (e.g. -->). However I think that any benefit gained by operators like this is lost in confusion. In order to back up my suggestion, I'd like to point out, that this is indeed already how it is done for block comments. i.e. we do not expect {-> to be an operator, we expect it to be the beginning of a comment. Secondly, from my limited experience helping to teach Haskell, the comment syntax is a primary source of confusion for beginners. Beginners inevitably forget (or don't know) to add the space, and will receive confusing errors about undefined symbols, or type mismatches. This is made yet more confusing by the fact that the compiler appears to be pointing at an error in a comment. Thanks Tom Davie