[Haskell-cafe] Bird-style and blank lines

[wren ng thornton]

Paulo Tanimoto wrote:
> [1] I don't think it's that common to add a ">" by accident.

By intention, probably. But by accident it is a lot more common than you 
might think. Accidents like corrupting the linebreaks or line wrapping 
in a file are quite prevalent when exchanging files across different 
platforms or medium formats. Consider also file type misdetection with 
other languages like HTML; or more convincingly, consider language 
interleaving. And there're always garden variety typos like dropping a 
bird track or adding a space before it.

Usually such corruption is easily captured by code not compiling, but I 
think the big thing to consider when suggesting changes to the .lhs 
format is how it affects the robustness of detecting file corruption, 
typos, etc. The whitespace restriction captures a goodly number of typos 
mentioned above, though it may not be so helpful for the other corruptions.

-- 
Live well,
~wren