[ghc-steering-committee] #686: Amendment to MultilineStrings, recommendation: accept

[Malte Ott]

Dear committee,

in

https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/686

Brandon Chinn proposes to slightly modify the recently accepted MultilineStrings
proposal:

"For the calculation of whitespace prefix removal string gaps (i.e. the /   /
syntax) should be regarded as non-whitespace."

This is technically a breaking change so we should deliberate on it, but I don’t see
why anyone would come into this situation in the first place, so I don’t think
we should dwell on this.

A motivation for the change is that it is easier to implement. I am torn whether
it is more or less surprising to users, with maybe a small tendency to less
surprising, so I recommend we go with it.

The committee could decide to be annoying about this. This is a not strongly
motivated change which theoretically changes the semantics of a released
extension without warnings or compile errors. 

However, the extension would surely count as experimental if we were already using the
classification we agreed upon. And this tiny change has already been merged
as part of a bug fix and I think we should let this pass out of respect to our
implementors.

Please voice your opinions, I aim to declare this proposal accepted in 7 days.

Best
Malte