Editor Tab Expansion

[Ingo Wechsung]

Hello,

I'm new to Haskell and FP in general and I find it great. 

Having more than 10 years expirience with "whitespace does not matter"
languages,
the only thing that drives me crazy is the layout rule.

As far as I understand it, I have 2 options:

1. Use braces and semicolons and ignore the layout rules.

2. Change the settings in all my editors so that the code looks like the
Haskell compiler sees it. 
Currently, I expand tabs to 4 spaces only, so

\tx=bar

looks like

____foo = bar

to me when the compiler sees

________foo = bar

I would not want to change dozens of .exrc files, shell startup files with
and/or ultraedit settings on many different machines. 
I also do not want to care whether there are spaces or tabs in front of my
source code lines.

So I'm stuck with option 1, right?
Just to be sure, can I really, really forget about layout if I write fully
braced and semicolonoized code?

Besides, is there any reason why the syntax is LET { decl1; decl2; ... } IN
expr when LET and IN are sufficient enough to enclose the declarations?

Greetings,
Ingo