layout rule infelicity

Ashley Yakeley ashley@semantic.org
Thu, 30 May 2002 04:34:15 -0700


At 2002-05-30 04:19, Johannes Waldmann wrote:

>same here, for exactly these reasons. students get really confused.
>
>on the other hand, students regularily get confused by other things as well,
>like homework assignments on formal languages,
>so that alone is not enough reason to drop the subject altogether :-)

In the latter case, they are learning something useful. In the former 
case, the confusion emerges out of a useless property of the language. 
Let the students use {;} if it eliminates confusion, it's still perfectly 
good Haskell.

I am certainly not proposing Haskell be modified to eliminate the layout 
option. I'm just curious as to why Haskell programmers choose to use it.

-- 
Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA