Comment Syntax

[Henrik Nilsson]

Hi all,

To corroborate Wadler's law further.

Josef wrote:

 > Oh yes, it does happen that a single line comment begins with a
 > special symbol. It has happened to me on several occations when using
 > haddock annotation to my source code. It is all to easy to forget that
 > extra space. With incomprehensible error messages as a result.

But might that not just mean that the error messages ought to be
improved?

I don't know how hard that would be, but after having played around
a bit with GHC, the messages I get are either of the type
"parse error on input '--|'" or of the type "Not in scope: `-->'"
(followed by lots of other stuff not being in scope etc).

If this really is a big problem for beginners, it would not seem
totally infeasible to add some special code that helpfully suggests
that a space perhaps ought to be inserted?

Or have you seen significantly worse error messages?

Best,

/Henrik

-- 
Henrik Nilsson
School of Computer Science and Information Technology
The University of Nottingham
nhn at cs.nott.ac.uk

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