[xmonad] Config File Format

[Gwern Branwen]

On 2008.05.15 04:15:11 -0700, David Roundy <droundy at darcs.net> scribbled 1.2K characters:
> On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 01:20:08AM -0400, Gwern Branwen wrote:
> > * Actually, would anyone lynch me if I did something like go through XMC
> > and remove all the $s from the examples and docs?
>
> I wouldn't lynch you, but I don't think it's a good idea.  When parens
> replace $s, edits become nonlocal, and I don't think that's an improvement.
> But I also don't work on (or really use) the docs, so probably my opinion
> doesn't matter.
>
> David

Well, the hope was that matters would be clearer if examples looked like "define a 'foo = bar (baz (quux 1))'; just from basic mathematics, people understand this syntax, while "foo = bar $ baz $ quux 1" differs quite a bit - $s are non-standard and quite different in other languages, we've obfuscated the function application, and now we can't paste in the definition of 'foo' somewhere, because other operators might mess things up.

eg if a user tries to take 'main = foo >>= xmonad' and pastes in the parenthesized version, 'main = bar (baz (quux 1)) >>= xmonad', I think it would work, but pasting in the dollar version would give you 'main = bar $ baz $ quux 1 >>= xmonad', which gets parsed as something odd, maybe 'main = bar $ baz (quux >>= xmonad)' or something. Which leads to a relatively non-obvious error.

--
gwern
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