Here is a sample Haskell code block:
-- This is a comment <- notice how this is syntax highlighted as though it were code
{- This is also a Haskell comment -}
// This isn't even a comment in Haskell, it's a syntax error.
# This isn't a comment either.
-- // Only this is a comment to both Haskell and SO's syntax highlighter.
-- Some actual Haskell code:
f :: a -> a
f x = x
-- Some more actual Haskell code:
f' :: (a -> a') -> [a -> a] -> a -> a'
f' f0 fs = foldl' (.) f0 fs
The questions are all tagged with the language, right? So they could use the tags to determine which highlighting quirks to enable.
There is no consistent syntax highlighting on StackOverflow. While prettify.js, the syntax highlighting mechanism it uses, does support a lot of languages, there is currently no way for an author to get the language tag through to that script. Haskell is only one of many languages that suffer from this. In guess-mode, prettify.js seems to lean strongly towards languages with syntax similar to C.
It seems that something like <code class="prettyprint lang-haskell"> could be put on the HTML whitelist for Markdown, but this proposal has gone unanswered for over a year now. See for example this question: Syntax highlighting language hints.
'really messes the formatting: meta.stackexchange.com/q/6812/7586 . Anyway, assuming there's no AI code that can detect the language, what are you suggesting?--is also an SQL comment, but it can be tricky separating it from the decrement operator.'in Haskell is a character that can present in an identifier, so we can't use the "close the comment" trick in VB.lang-hs) is now explicitly supported.lang-hsit the same aslang-haskell? Also,haskellseems to produce different results thanlang-haskell—what's with that?