[Haskell] Beyond ASCII only editors for Haskell

[Ketil Malde]

Benjamin Franksen <benjamin.franksen at bessy.de> writes:

>> It seems to me that the layout conventions work pretty well. I do not
>> see much code where it is not used, so generally people must like it.

Works for me.  It helps *a lot* to have a sensible editor that knows
where to position things of course. I use Emacs, but should probably
upgrade the mode, as it doesn't place 'let' in do-blocks correctly.

> Please forgive me for taking this as an opportunity to rant about the 
> single misfeature of Haskell's layout syntax, which is how if/then/else 
> must be layed out. The problem is that the 'else' must be indented 
> further than the 'if', so that this:

You're talking about monads and do-notation here?  I have no problems
with this in pure code.  I tend to find 'when' is more useful for
monadic code, but yes, positioning ifs and cases can be a bit painful.

> Other than this, I like layout so much that I have never actually used 
> the explicit {;}-notation.

I sometimes use it for compactness:

 ... case x of {1 -> foo; 2 -> bar; _ -> error "too much"}

And with ghci.

-kzm
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants