On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 12:02 AM, Simon Peyton-Jones
| data LiteralDesugaring m = | LiteralDesugaring | { desugarInt :: MonadThings m => Integer -> m CoreExpr | , desugarWord :: MonadThings m => Integer -> m CoreExpr ...
I am not sure why you want to control the desugaring of literals. Why literals? And why is literals enough?
I'm not sure if literals are enough, but literals essentially as dependencies on ghc-prim package: 5 is desugared to something like GHC.Num.fromInteger (GHC.Integer.SmallInteger (5# :: Int#)) and "Hello" is desugared to something like GHC.String.unpackCString ("Hello"# :: Addr#) Fore backends other than drop-in-replacement-for-current-native-code-ghc-backend we may want an alternative desugarings. For example, * we may want to use some very simple Integer implementation. We can use doubles instead of integers at first to get things rolling. * in javascript we better use other "unpacking" function for strings, since Javascript strings doesn't have terminating NUL and have length built-in. -- Victor Nazarov