"Niklas Broberg"
Taking Lava, a hardware description language, as my example, I would argue that many users of Lava don't really care if it's embedded in Haskell or whereever it comes from, they would just use it. ....
lavac Main.hs
where lavac is could simply be a script alias of ghc -fprelude-is Lava
By using an explicit Lava compiler you declare that this is indeed a Lava program, and you don't expect it to work in any other setting, in particular not with a Haskell compiler like GHC.
And in the same line of thinking, I would want a way of specifying suffixes of input source files. It would be much neater to call your files Foo.lava or similar, and be able to tell GHC to treat them as normal .hs files, i.e.
lavac <== ghc -hssuf lava -fprelude-is Lava
Very intriguing ideas. However, I'm sure there are easier ways of implementing a 'lavac' (or other domain-specific compiler) than adding new flags to ghc (and by implication, to every other Haskell compiler as well). All you really need is to hook up a rather simple pre-processor. For instance, #!/bin/sh { echo 'module Main where\nimport Lava\n' ; cat $1 } >`basename $1 .lava`.hs If you want an automatic file association based on suffix, then something like hmake can do the mapping of .lava onto .hs via this little pre-processor script. This solution has the additional benefit that it is compiler-agnostic. Regards, Malcolm