Joachim Breitner's Homepage

The Haskell syntax uses comma-separated lists in various places and does, in contrast to other programming language, not allow a trailing comma. If everything goes on one line you write

  (foo, bar, baz)

and everything is nice.

Lining up

But if you want to have one entry on each line, then the obvious plan

  (foo,
   bar,
   baz
  )

is aesthetically unpleasing and moreover, extending the list by one to

  (foo,
   bar,
   baz,
   quux
  )

modifies two lines, which produces less pretty diffs.

Because it is much more common to append to lists rather than to prepend, Haskellers have developed the idiom of leading comma:

  ( foo
  , bar
  , baz
  , quux
  )

which looks strange until you are used to it, but solves the problem of appending to a list. And we see this idiom in many places:

• In Cabal files:

    build-depends: base >= 4.3 && < 5
                 , array
                 , deepseq >= 1.2 && < 1.5

• In module headers: {-# LANGUAGE DefaultSignatures , EmptyCase , ExistentialQuantification , FlexibleContexts , FlexibleInstances , GADTs , InstanceSigs , KindSignatures , RankNTypes , ScopedTypeVariables , TemplateHaskell , TypeFamilies , TypeInType , TypeOperators , UndecidableInstances #-}

Think outside the list!

I started to avoid this pattern where possible. And it is possible everywhere instead of having a declaration with a list, you can just have multiple declarations. I.e.:

• In Cabal files: build-depends: base >= 4.3 && < 5 build-depends: array build-depends: deepseq >= 1.2 && < 1.5
• In module headers: {-# LANGUAGE DefaultSignatures #-} {-# LANGUAGE EmptyCase #-} {-# LANGUAGE ExistentialQuantification #-} {-# LANGUAGE FlexibleContexts #-} {-# LANGUAGE FlexibleInstances #-} {-# LANGUAGE GADTs #-} {-# LANGUAGE InstanceSigs #-} {-# LANGUAGE KindSignatures #-} {-# LANGUAGE RankNTypes #-} {-# LANGUAGE ScopedTypeVariables #-} {-# LANGUAGE TemplateHaskell #-} {-# LANGUAGE TypeFamilies #-} {-# LANGUAGE TypeInType #-} {-# LANGUAGE TypeOperators #-} {-# LANGUAGE UndecidableInstances #-}

It is a bit heavier, but it has a number of advantages:

1. Both appending and prepending works without touching other lines.
2. It is visually more homogeneous, making it – despite the extra words – easier to spot mistakes visually.
3. You can easily sort the declarations alphabetically with your editor.
4. Especially in Cabal files: If you have syntax error in your dependency specification (which I always have, writing << instead of < due to my Debian background), cabal will actually give you a helpful error location – it always only tells you which build-depends stanza was wrong, so if you have only one, then that’s not helpful.

What when it does not work?

Unfortunately, not every list in Haskell can have that treatment, and that’s why the recent GHC proposal on ExtraCommas wants to lift the restriction. In particular, it wants to allow trailing commas in subexport lists:

module Foo
    ( Foo(
        A,
	B,
      ),
      fromFoo,
    )

(Weirdly, export lists already allow trailing commas). An alternative here might be to write

module Foo
    ( Foo(A),
      Foo(B),
      fromFoo,
    )

and teach the compiler to not warn about the duplicate export of the Foo type.

For plain lists, this idiom can be useful:

list :: [Int]
list = let (>>) = (++) in do
   [ 1 ]
   [ 2 ]
   [ 3 ]
   [ 4 ]

It requires RebindableSyntax, so I do not recommend it for regular code, but it can be useful in a module that is dedicated to hold some generated data or configuration. And of course it works with any binary operator, not just (++)