[Haskell-cafe] Literate Haskell

[Andrew Pimlott]

On Fri, Feb 18, 2005 at 09:21:00PM +0100, Dmitri Pissarenko wrote:
> I'm curious what experienced Haskellers think about using literate 
> Haskell in daily work.

This isn't a deep answer, but I find both of Haskell's literate syntaxes
more trouble than they're worth.  The leading "> " syntax makes a lot of
editor operations (joining lines, changing indentation) more cumbersome,
and it takes away two characters that every-so-often come in handy at
the end of a line.  The LaTeX syntax is too verbose unless you're really
writing LaTeX (so I'm sure for papers it's great).

I do use a literate style sometimes, but I just use ordinary comments
for it.  As far as I'm concerned, the psychology of having comments be
the default mode is not worth the minor annoyance it causes me.

I use vim, which can handle free-form text with a comment leader very
well, but probably isn't flexible enough to make writing code with a
leader as comfortable as without.

Andrew