>>16
Fail gracefully.
>>1
I very much don‘t like having to indent the first parameter to a function to align the rest of them with that. It just feels wrong. Otherwise, I guess they‘re not too bad, but still far from perfect.
Another problem is that if I insert a blank line (or a comment line) between my nicely-aligned text, it fucks it up (I‘ll have two blocks of text which are both internally nicely-aligned, but not nicely-aligned with each other.)
Conversely, I would sometimes have to insert a blank line in order to please it. Let's presume that GHC were modified to change Haskell‘s layout rule to use elastic tab stops instead. Then let‘s say I have
f x = let a = b + b
b = c + c
c = d + d
d = x + x
in a + a
I‘d have to insert a blank line between the "d = x + x" and the "in a + a", just to please this thing. You gain some convenience, but you end up with less control. I suppose you could put this case down to Haskell‘s layout rule being retarded, though.
>>6
Well, you can use tabs in Haskell, it's just retarded. A few editors behave as the Haskell layout rule expects (tab aligns to nearest multiple of 8) — GNU nano and Windows notepad are two.