It’s possible they tried the British layout on their American ANSI keyboard, which is missing the extra key that ISO keyboards have (the one next to enter which the British layout uses for # and ~)?
I’m not actually sure how to press that key at all if you’re using the British layout on an ANSI keyboard
It’s sometimes called comma-leading style where you move all the special characters to the front of the line and it is exceedingly common in Haskell, possibly due to how Haskell treats significant whitespace. You’ve surely seen list definitions that look like this:
or a data definition like this:
or a list of module exports like this:
Or in a long function type declaration where the arrows are moved to the start of the line, or a record definition, etc. etc.