character syntax

[Ian Zimmerman]

itz> All this taken together, I mean, _really_, is the lexical
itz> structure of Haskell a botch, or what?

Jon> No. Innovative. All the problems described in this thread reflect
Jon> unwarranted assumptions inherited in emacs. It's plainly possible
Jon> to parse Haskell, and not hard either.

First, parsing of a complete program (eg. by a compiler) is quite
different from parsing a buffer that is being edited by a human.  The
latter is hard, even for fairly well-specified languages.
Irregularities only make it harder.

Second, this argument would be easier to accept if there in fact were
an equally innovative tool capable of providing all the editing
goodies Emacs normally does, for Haskell.  But I don't know of one,
even now, 10 years or so after Haskell's birth.

-- 
Ian Zimmerman, Oakland, California, U.S.A.
GPG: 433BA087  9C0F 194F 203A 63F7 B1B8  6E5A 8CA3 27DB 433B A087
The world has taken on a thickness of vulgarity that raises
a spiritual man's contempt to the violence of a passion.  Baudelaire