On 2/2/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Henrik Nilsson</b> <<a href="mailto:nhn@cs.nott.ac.uk">nhn@cs.nott.ac.uk</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Hi all,<br><br>To corroborate Wadler's law further.</blockquote><div><br>:-) <br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Josef wrote:
<br><br> > Oh yes, it does happen that a single line comment begins with a<br> > special symbol. It has happened to me on several occations when using<br> > haddock annotation to my source code. It is all to easy to forget that
<br> > extra space. With incomprehensible error messages as a result.<br><br>But might that not just mean that the error messages ought to be<br>improved?<br><br>I don't know how hard that would be, but after having played around
<br>a bit with GHC, the messages I get are either of the type<br>"parse error on input '--|'" or of the type "Not in scope: `-->'"<br>(followed by lots of other stuff not being in scope etc).<br><br>
If this really is a big problem for beginners, it would not seem<br>totally infeasible to add some special code that helpfully suggests<br>that a space perhaps ought to be inserted?<br><br>Or have you seen significantly worse error messages?
</blockquote><div><br>My point here was not that the error messages was that terrible. I just wanted to point out to Manuel that it does happen that single line comments start with a symbol. Which makes the current comment syntax somewhat awkward.
<br></div><br>Cheers,<br><br>/Josef<br></div>