RE: Getting constants from #defines

I was expecting something like

foreign import ccall unsafe "static ncurses.h ERR" cERR :: CInt

to allow me to access the value of ERR (a #define) as cERR. However, as far as I can tell GHC is trying to compile this as if ERR was a function. This seems silly to me as a function can always be defined with a type "a -> b" where "a", "b" or both can be "()" so this should be unambiguous.

The FFI doesn't have support for grabbing the values of #defines - you need to use another tool to do this (autoconf, hsc2hs, c2hs, green-card, hdirect, whatever). The declaration above binds cERR to a function of zero arguments. i.e. in C-speak this would be void cERR( void ); A function of type a->b has one argument of type 'a', not zero. Cheers, Simon