I've noticed in a few cases that the #light syntax is horribly picky about certain formatting "errors". For example, this type declaration:

type MyBase =
new() =
{ }
then
printfn "Mybase constructed"

- it has to be formatted in *precisely* this way. I can't pull the empty pair of curly braces in the previous line. I can't indent the "then" in any other way.

The required formatting is also inconsistent. For instance, this is valid:

type Foo =
val state: int
new() = {
state = 0
}

But it seems to be impossible to have the opening curly brace on the previous line and combine with "then", as in the above example. If there's a "then", the opening curly must always be on the line after the new() - at least that's the only way I could make it work.

There are other weird examples, like using the inherited keyword to call a base class constructor. As far as I could see, that keyword must always be appended to the end of the line, which is kind of crazy if there are many arguments to pass to the base class constructor. And so on...

I've read comments in this forum saying yeah, it's great because it forces me to format my code correctly. Well - okay, but how am I supposed to know? I wasn't able to find a single piece of documentation anywhere that shows all the various details of the required formatting, and all Visual Studio ever says to me is "Syntax error".

I'm sure that's a stupid misunderstanding of mine, but initially I took the #light syntax to be a simple "continuation line" syntax - basically, let me format things as I see fit (compiler ignores whitespace), and indentation defines where a line of code ends. Apparently that's not the idea behind #light syntax at all. What is the idea? How exactly does it work? And where is it documented?

Thanks for any hints

Oliver