Limber separators

[Cale Gibbard]

I can't really be the only one here who thinks that this kind of
discussion of extensions to the syntax of Haskell is totally
inappropriate when we have a large number of already implemented
extensions to the language whose interactions with each other are
largely undocumented. The Haskell Report isn't the place to be talking
about new features, in my mind. If this project turns into
bike-shedding the concrete syntax of the language, it's hard to
imagine real progress being made on the actual problem, which is that
the Haskell Reports as they stand are not as relevant as they should
be with regard to the language in which we're writing programs today.

In my opinion, this sort of bikeshed discussion of new features is the
main reason that H2010 didn't really get very far relative to H98.

If you personally want the ability to insert additional commas at the
beginning or end of lists, perhaps a better plan is to start with
asking the GHC developers with where to begin on a patch to the
parser. Then once everyone is using your extension, some future
Haskell Report can perhaps document it.

I'm sorry if this comes off as harsh, and I don't really mean to be
picking on Alexander specifically here, but I'd really like for the
next Haskell Report to be relevant to the language we're using today,
and I think there's too much to be done in the direction of reporting
on the things we already have to even consider things which are
unimplemented, or even things which were only *just* implemented.

On 6 May 2016 at 15:45, Alexander Berntsen <alexander at plaimi.net> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA512
>
> On 06/05/16 19:22, David Luposchainsky wrote:
>> Just for confirmation, you meant
>>
>>> > [ Foo
>>> > , Bar
>>> > , Fu
>>> > , Baz ]
>> and not
>>
>>> > [ Foo
>>> > , Bar
>>> > , Fu
>>> > , Baz
>>> > ]
>> in your email, right?
> Yes. The latter is how I have adapted my style to be able to remove Baz
> in a one-line diff, so I wrote it automatically. :)
>
> Similarly, this fixes the removal/addition problem for the top
> element, but not the bottom element:
>
> [
> Foo,
> Bar,
> Fu,
> Baz
> ]
> - --
> Alexander
> alexander at plaimi.net
> https://secure.plaimi.net/~alexander
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