the dreaded offside rule

[Lennart Augustsson]

I agree with it being complicated.  I don't know of any compiler
that implements it correctly.  Do you say your combinators do?

That said, I don't think it can be replaced easily without breaking
existing code, so I'm unwilling to change unless someone can show
an alternative that handles 99.9% of the existing code.

	-- Lennart

Doaitse Swierstra wrote:
> It is with some hesitation that I want to bring up another point, in 
> which Haskell' could be an improvement above Haskell: the offside rule.
> 
> Although I manage to live with it, I encountered many problems with it 
> in the past:
> 
>   1) it is impossible to explain the precise workings of the rule to a 
> class of first years undergraduates
> 
>      This is extremely demotivating. I do not want to teach using the 
> following utterances: "If you write your programs in the same style as I 
> do on my slides, you will usually get away with it". Students are 
> perfectly happy to accept that complicated things are complicated, but 
> are not very willing to buy complicated explanations for things which 
> ought to be simple. I furthermore think it is  waist of time to to have 
> to go into this in my lectures. I do not think the alternative, in which 
> you always have to write { ; ; } is an option. A language in which every 
> let is followed by a { is plain stupid; just like in Pascal, where each 
> procedure, function, const, var and begin keyword has to be preceded by 
> a (thus superfluous) semicolon.
> 
>   2) it has created havoc among students for years, with Hugs 
> complaining about improper semicolons, whereas
>      the student has not typed a single semicolon in his program. many 
> students think Haskell is a complicated language,
>      mainly because of offside rules, (and the monomorphism restriction 
> of course)
> 
>   3) it is formulated in an implementation oriented way, prohibiting 
> proper tool support for parser generation
> 
>      With our parser combinator library we have created very efficient 
> error-correcting parsers (far more efficient that Parsec based ones) for 
> quite a few languages (including Haskell). Creating one for Haskell 
> however became a nightmare, although we have managed to encapsulate the 
> problem in a special offside parser combinator. Our parsers perform 
> error-correction automatically, and this is simply not compatible with a 
> prescription in the language definition as to how certain parse errors 
> should be dealt with (especially that they are not errors). We had to 
> put parser-brain-surgery into place in order to cope with the 
> description of the offside rule. Although the problem is solved by the 
> introduction of the offside combinator now, I think it is a sign of 
> unhealthiness of the formulation, which is too implementation dependent.
> 
>   4) based on many examples my claim is that almost no Haskell 
> programmer can always correctly apply to offside rule
> 
> We might go back to something simpler, like e.g. the Miranda(tm) rule, 
> in which declarations have to start in the same column, and a 
> declaration extends to the lower right of its first character.
> 
>  Doaitse Swierstra
> 
> 
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