[mhh__]

I think a better (subjective of course) lesson might be to enforce a style.

I have been thinking about making a toy compiler (I wanted to write a borrow checker) that treats bad code as an error, solely aimed at numerical code - I have recently had "Scientific Programming in Python for physics etc." inflicted on me.

Slight tangent, but I think if Haskell enforced some kind of whitespace a la Python it would be much more approachable in real codebases (Haskell is usually quite readable if you are just translating mathematics into code but it - to me at least - feels dreadful as a productive language because of the way a lot of functions seem to be dumped onto into the text editor in a lot of the code I have read)

[iso-8859-1]

What do you mean? Whitespace does mean something in Haskell, see http://echo.rsmw.net/n00bfaq.html .

[dllthomas]

Not really relevant to the broader discussion, but Haskell's whitespace sensitivity is defined in terms of automatic insertion of braces and semicolons, and you can write it that way instead if you want. A few people do write Haskell that way (SPJ maybe?) but the community is mostly united around using whitespace. That said, it's useful to know about the braces and semicolons if you're generating Haskell code, because that's often easier. Also occasionally at the GHCI prompt, where it will let you keep things on one line.

[todd8]

As in Python, whitespace in the form of indentation matters in Haskell.