On Mon, Oct 23, 2006 at 01:36:41PM +0100, Henrik Nilsson wrote:
The background to the proposal was that Haskell 98 prevents an arguably reasonable style of indentation, and that this has turned out to be a problem in practice: i.e. it tends to trip up a lot of unsuspecting people, in particular beginners.
Yes, one can argue that they should learn "the right way", but this is really a very minor detail that many think would be best if people didn't have to worry about in the first place.
It is not even clear to me that there is a single right way. the proper indentation style for if statements depends on both context, the subexpressions and the structure of the term you want to emphasize/subdue.
The proposal is actually very lightweight (just allow an optional ";" in the appropriate place), and thus it is not even a question about new "syntactic sugar". At least not according to my understanding of the term. Also, it does not complicate the (already complicated) layout rules further, which is quite important.
If I recall correctly, the proposal was implemented in GHC (and JHC?) shortly after it had been put forward, with very little effort indeed, and has not caused any ill side effects that I'm aware of.
Yes. It was implemented in jhc within a couple hours of the idea being proposed (the implementation itself taking a couple minutes). all of jhc's standard libraries compliled without problem with the extension enabled and no issues have arisen from it always being enabled. John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈