On Thu, 2 Feb 2006, Henrik Nilsson wrote: > Hi all, > > To corroborate Wadler's law further. > > Josef wrote: > > > Oh yes, it does happen that a single line comment begins with a > > special symbol. It has happened to me on several occations when using > > haddock annotation to my source code. It is all to easy to forget that > > extra space. With incomprehensible error messages as a result. > > But might that not just mean that the error messages ought to be > improved? > > I don't know how hard that would be, but after having played around > a bit with GHC, the messages I get are either of the type > "parse error on input '--|'" or of the type "Not in scope: `-->'" > (followed by lots of other stuff not being in scope etc). > > If this really is a big problem for beginners, it would not seem > totally infeasible to add some special code that helpfully suggests > that a space perhaps ought to be inserted? > > Or have you seen significantly worse error messages?
Well, if anecdotal evidence from a real live beginner would help, I've never had problems with the comments. I think I made that mistake once, looked at the line it failed on, and added the space. _______________________________________________ Haskell-prime mailing list Haskell-prime@haskell.org http://haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime