Haskell/Indentation

Haskell relies on indentation to reduce the verbosity of your code. Despite some complexity in practice, there are really only a couple fundamental layout rules.

The golden rule of indentation

Code which is part of some expression should be indented further in than the beginning of that expression (even if the expression is not the leftmost element of the line).

The easiest example is a 'let' binding group. The equations binding the variables are part of the 'let' expression, and so should be indented further in than the beginning of the binding group: the 'let' keyword. When you start the expression on a separate line, you only need to indent by one space (although more than one space is also acceptable and may be clearer).

let
 x = a
 y = b

You may also place the first clause alongside the 'let' as long as you indent the rest to line up:

wrong	wrong	right
let x = a y = b	let x = a y = b	let x = a y = b

This tends to trip up a lot of beginners: All grouped expressions must be exactly aligned. On the first line, Haskell counts everything to the left of the expression as indent, even though it is not whitespace.

Here are some more examples:

do
  foo
  bar
  baz

do foo
   bar
   baz

where x = a
      y = b

case x of
  p  -> foo
  p' -> baz

Note that with 'case' it is less common to place the first subsidiary expression on the same line as the 'case' keyword (although it would still be valid code). Hence, the subsidiary expressions in a case expression tend to be indented only one step further than the 'case' line. Also note how we lined up the arrows here: this is purely aesthetic and is not counted as different layout; only indentation (i.e. whitespace beginning on the far-left edge) makes a difference to the interpretation of the layout.

Things get more complicated when the beginning of an expression is not at the start of a line. In this case, it's safe to just indent further than the line containing the expression's beginning. In the following example, do comes at the end of a line, so the subsequent parts of the expression simply need to be indented relative to the line that contains the do, not relative to the do itself.

myFunction firstArgument secondArgument = do
  foo
  bar
  baz

Here are some alternative layouts which all work:

myFunction firstArgument secondArgument =
  do foo
     bar
     baz

myFunction firstArgument secondArgument = do foo
                                             bar
                                             baz
myFunction firstArgument secondArgument =
  do
     foo
     bar
     baz

Explicit characters in place of indentation

Indentation is actually optional if you instead use semicolons and curly braces for grouping and separation, as in "one-dimensional" languages like C. Even though the consensus among Haskell programmers is that meaningful indentation leads to better-looking code, understanding how to convert from one style to the other can help understand the indentation rules. The entire layout process can be summed up in three translation rules (plus a fourth one that doesn't come up very often):

1. If you see one of the layout keywords, (let, where, of, do), insert an open curly brace (right before the stuff that follows it)
2. If you see something indented to the SAME level, insert a semicolon
3. If you see something indented LESS, insert a closing curly brace
4. If you see something unexpected in a list, like where, insert a closing brace before instead of a semicolon.

For instance, this definition...

foo :: Double -> Double
foo x =
    let s = sin x
        c = cos x
    in 2 * s * c

...can be rewritten without caring about the indentation rules as:

foo :: Double -> Double;
foo x = let {
  s = sin x;
  c = cos x;
  } in 2 * s * c

One circumstance in which explicit braces and semicolons can be convenient is when writing one-liners in GHCi:

Prelude> let foo :: Double -> Double; foo x = let { s = sin x; c = cos x } in 2 * s * c

Exercises
Rewrite this snippet from the Control Structures chapter using explicit braces and semicolons: doGuessing num = do putStrLn "Enter your guess:" guess <- getLine case compare (read guess) num of LT -> do putStrLn "Too low!" doGuessing num GT -> do putStrLn "Too high!" doGuessing num EQ -> putStrLn "You Win!"

Layout in action

wrong	wrong	right	right
do first thing second thing third thing	do first thing second thing third thing	do first thing second thing third thing	do first thing second thing third thing

Indent to the first

Due to the "golden rule of indentation" described above, a curly brace within a do block depends not on the do itself but the thing that immediately follows it. For example, this weird-looking block of code is totally acceptable:

         do
 first thing
 second thing
 third thing

As a result, you could also write combined if/do combination like this:

Wrong	Right	Right
if foo then do first thing second thing third thing else do something_else	if foo then do first thing second thing third thing else do something_else	if foo then do first thing second thing third thing else do something_else

It isn't about the do, it's about lining up all the items that are at the same level within the do.

Thus, all of the following are acceptable:

main = do
  first thing
  second thing

or

main =
  do
    first thing
    second thing

or

main =
  do first thing
     second thing