[Haskell-cafe] Indentation woes

Thomas Conway drtomc at gmail.com
Thu Jul 26 19:10:38 EDT 2007


On 7/27/07, Neil Mitchell <ndmitchell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Personally, I have no problem with the current way (and would consider
> anything other than 4 leading spaces in the first example to be evil).
> However, if you are using a text editor which doesn't automatically
> indent the start of following lines, it might be a bit more annoying.
> Of course, if your editor is that bad you should consider changing to
> virtually anything which isn't notepad.

Or pico. :-) You'd be amazed the number of undergraduates I taught who
refused to learn to use gvim, emacs, or any other *programming*
editor, and instead spent 75% of their time battling the editor.
<sigh>

I must say, I agree about the indentation question. My experience is
that if you use 4 space indentation and run out of columns, then it's
time to refactor, and think more about how your logical structure is
working (you may recall, this list recently introduced me to the Maybe
monad transformer for exactly this reason). It's actually a pretty
effective rule of thumb.

cheers,
T.
-- 
Dr Thomas Conway
drtomc at gmail.com

Silence is the perfectest herald of joy:
I were but little happy, if I could say how much.


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