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0 pointslogicchains5y ago0 comments

With white-space insensitive code I can easily cut/paste code from one function to another, without having to potentially manually re-indent it afterwards. This makes refactoring easier.

For formatting, it means I never need to manually add any spaces or tabs: the formatter always knows exactly how to indent it. With whitespace-sensitive code, I have to manually pick the indentation, as different indentations could have different semantics. That's why if I hit tab in Emacs when editing a Haskell file, it will cycle through multiple possible indentions. If I hit it in a whitespace-insensitive language, it will just move it to the "correct" indentation straight away and I don't need to worry about it.

Using {} braces in Haskell seems less intuitive, at least to me. E.g. how would I use braces to avoid the need to manually indent a nested where statement?

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gnufx5y ago

I have to fix up the layout essentially manually every time I have to edit C in someone else's idea of correct layout when they haven't included C Mode rules for it. (That's assuming they want a consistent style for changes, of course.)

If simplicity of parsing, and cut-and-paste are important, we should be using Lisp, of course, but there are still different indentation styles.

frank25y ago

>how would I use braces to avoid the need to manually indent a nested where statement?

Warning: untested code

  main = printLn (foo * bar) where {foo = 3; bar = 4}

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