Re: Good Haskell Style

Jon Fairbairn wrote:

David Roundy writes:

...

Trailing white space doesn't particularly hurt, except if you're using version control, in which case any removal of white space is liable to conflict with actual coding changes, so it's better to have a policy that it shouldn't be included.

This is surely an issue with either the language definition or the version control system. In general, we ought to aim for a state of affairs where every requirement we make is mechannically checked. In this particular case, I'd say that the version control system ought to be more syntactically aware when looking for differences¹, for example by removing all trailing space before doing comparisons (and making sure that anything extracted from the repo has none).

...

I've certainly never heard of a scenario in which trailing white space is beneficial.

Neither have I, but since it's invisible, asking that it not be there without providing automatic mechanical assistance is to add a tedious burden.

sed -e 's/[ \t]+$//' Cheers Ben