🚀 go-pugleaf

>All this to save a few characters?

The point, I think, is not save a few characters,
but to save a few lines (and saving lines is useful,
because it allows you to get more of a program
on the screen).

Consider C indentation rules:
	if (test) {
	    statement1;
	    statement2;
	}

Note the final line. This is needed for the final delimiter,
but contains no useful information. It wastes cathode rays/paper.
It puts extra white space in a useless and ugly place.

You could use a Lisp-style of formatting, where the final
delimiter is on the last "real" line:
	if (test) {
	    statement1;
	    statement2;}
But now the last statement is different from the other(s),
which is esthetically ugly and makes updating error-prone.

I find it hard to take seriously people's concerns about
tabs. A program with tabs whose intervals are not every
8th character is already non-portable (it will look a mess
when viewed on a normal system), and it is in any case
an easy problem to fix in your editor, in your
communication software, or with an explicit filter.

So, I believe it may be reasonable to make syntactic use of
indentation. The specifics of Haskell's particular off-side
rule is a different issue. I suggest that the rule
should be relative indentation of lines, not syntatic units.
That is, I would prefer something like:
	if (test)
	    statement1
	    statement2
instead of:
	if (test) statement1
	          statement2
-- 
	--Per Bothner
bothner@cs.wisc.edu Computer Sciences Dept, U. of Wisconsin-Madison