[Haskell-cafe] Layout rule (was Re: PrefixMap: code reviewrequest)

[Brian Hulley]

Malcolm Wallace wrote:
> Brian Hulley wrote:
>> However I think there is an error in the description of this in
>> section 2.7  of the Haskell98 report, which states:
>>
>> "If the indentation of the non-brace lexeme immediately following a
>> where,  let, do or of is less than or equal to the current
>> indentation level, then  instead of starting a layout, an empty list
>> "{}" is inserted, and layout  processing occurs for the current
>> level ..."
>>
>> I dispute the "or equal" in the above statement, since it seems to be
>> clearly in contradiction to what is actually being done.
>
> Section 2.7 does say that it is an informal description, so although
> it is correct, it is not complete.  In the case of the module header,
> the question is really "what is the current indentation level?" (that
> we must be strictly greater than).  The answer can be found in the
> formal definition of the layout rule in section 9.3.  At the
> beginning of the module, there is _no_ current indentation level -
> thus the fourth equation of L applies.

Thanks. However I do think the fact that there is a special case for the 
module head would merit a mention in section 2.7, because at the moment it's 
a bit like looking at a stack of chocolate cookies and defining the top one 
to be vanilla - it works but who'd ever have thought of it for themselves 
just looking at the visual indentation on the screen?

On the subject of 9.3, I'm puzzled by:
"For the purposes of the layout rule, Unicode characters in a source program 
are considered to be of the same, fixed, width as an ASCII character. 
However, to avoid visual confusion, programmers should avoid writing 
programs in which the meaning of implicit layout depends on the width of 
non-space characters."

Surely almost all Haskell programs rely on the width of every non-space 
character to be the same as the width of a space (ie monospaced font where 
one character == one glyph) as in

        let a = 3
             b = 5

I'd suggest that the word "non-space" should be replaced by "multi-glyph" 
and perhaps there could be a recommendation to avoid the use of multi-glyph 
characters in the first place (otherwise an editor would have to be smart 
enough to maintain the correct multi-glyph spaces in the columns under 
them...)

Regards, Brian.