[Haskell-cafe] question about indentation conventions

[Tikhon Jelvis]

That's certainly true. As I mentioned, I was actually considering a
*pretty-printer* rather than an automatic indentation tool per se. The end
results are similar, but the pretty-printer is really only the latter part
of the problem: it's predicated on already having a valid AST.

My particular use case involved diffing and merging ASTs directly; this
means that I would have to somehow output the result in a human-readable
format. Moreover, the actual AST I was outputting could have been the
combination of two others, without any prior concrete syntax! I still
haven't worked out a good way to do this for Haskell (or, to be fair, any
other language).

But yeah, Haskell is pretty intractable as far as language grammars go. I
think this is a great compromise--I value language expressiveness over
tooling--but it certainly is a compromise.


On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 10:10 AM, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 9:56 AM, Tikhon Jelvis <tikhon at jelv.is> wrote:
>
>> I've thought about writing an automatic indenting tool for Haskell (or,
>> more accurately, a pretty-printer) for another project I have, and this is
>> the main thing that threw me off. While automatic indentation might make
>> sense for less expressive languages (Google Go being an extreme example), I
>> think it would be too constraining for Haskell. After all, in reasonable
>> code, chances are that similar constructs end up meaning wildly different
>> things (especially with the advent of pervasive embedded DSLs), so the code
>> itself is a poor indicator of its own structure.
>>
>
> One might look at the history of the indentation modules for Emacs
> haskell-mode. Short version: they gave up, tab iterates through the
> possibilities because it's quite impossible to know which one is correct
> without a *semantic*, not just syntactic, understanding of the code.
> (Which, when you think about it, is pretty much par for the Haskell
> language definition. See also the literally impossible brace insertion rule
> of Haskell98.)
>
> --
> brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine
> associates
> allbery.b at gmail.com
> ballbery at sinenomine.net
> unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad
> http://sinenomine.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20130701/78ed2d3b/attachment-0001.htm>