Marc points out that the expressiveness of the Cabal language is insufficient for some packages, and a DSEL would be more expressive.  I have the same problem and still have to resort to makefiles to augment my .cabal files.
<br><br>DSELs also provide sharing/reuse.&nbsp; I know my Cabal specs are similar, and yet I cannot capture that commonality.<br><br>Using a DSEL does not imply that it route through IO, though from Marc&#39;s examples I&#39;m guessing he has IO in mind.&nbsp; Avoiding IO would address your points about day of week and random strings.
<br><br>So I hope Marc&#39;s suggestion gets some consideration.<br><br>&nbsp;- Conal<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 1/9/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Neil Mitchell</b> &lt;<a href="mailto:ndmitchell@gmail.com">ndmitchell@gmail.com
</a>&gt; wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Hi Marc,<br><br>[Snip]<br><br>&gt; Any ideas, comments?<br>&gt;<br>&gt; Anyone out there who wants to join and help implementing this idea?
<br><br>I&#39;d ask why there is a Setup.hs file at all, a nice textual<br>declarative form seems much more sensible. You can encode everything<br>in Haskell, but you probably shouldn&#39;t...<br><br>First off, its harder to read, harder to parse (unless you happen to
<br>be a Haskell compiler) and just not as straight forward. Should you be<br>able to pick which library version you want based on the day of the<br>week? Should your package name be allowed to be a random string which<br>
changes each time?<br><br>It is a cute idea (less different forms), but I don&#39;t think it fits<br>the problem in this case.<br><br>Thanks<br><br>Neil<br>_______________________________________________<br>cabal-devel mailing list
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