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.^[1]

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:

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

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

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:

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

if within do

This is a combination which trips up many Haskell programmers. Why does the following block of code not work?

-- why is this bad?
do first thing
   if condition
   then foo
   else bar
   third thing

-- still bad, just explicitly so
do { first thing
   ; if condition
   ; then foo
   ; else bar
   ; third thing }

Naturally, the Haskell compiler is confused because it thinks that you never finished writing your if expression, before writing a new statement. The compiler sees that you have written something like if condition;, which is bad because it is unfinished. In order to fix this, we need to indent the bottom parts of this if block so that then and else become part of the if statement.

-- whew, fixed it!
do first thing
   if condition
     then foo
     else bar
   third thing

-- the fixed version without sugar
do { first thing
   ; if condition
      then foo
      else bar
   ; third thing }

Now, the do block sees the whole if statement as one item. When if-then-else statements are not within do blocks, this specific indentation isn't technically necessary, but it never hurts, so it is a good habit to always indent if-then-else in this way.

Issues with indentation are explained further in connection with showing how do is syntactic sugar for the monadic operator (>>=). See Translating the bind operator and the associated footnote about indentation.

Notes

1. ↑ See section 2.7 of The Haskell Report (lexemes) on layout.