On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 10:56 AM, Claus Reinke
The advantage is ghci works without editline and readline. The disadvantage is if you want arrow keys and backspace to work, you should have installed http://www.thrysoee.dk/editline/ first.
libedit on Debian is very out-dated[1]. Haskell bindings (editline) doesn't compile against it (at least I could not compile it).
There was also no working libedit for mingw last time I checked (shelarcy was working on a patch at the time - did that work out?).
Would it be possible to use haskeline as a fallback/default, for future Ghc's?
http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/haskeline
As the author of haskeline, integrating it into ghc is on my TODO list. :-) Note that the earliest this could happen would be ghc-6.12.1, which won't be released for at least another year. But just to reiterate: 1) Other than on Windows, libedit is widely available and compatible (including Debian, which just needs the libedit-dev package). 2) The Windows console provides basic interaction even without libedit, including arrow key left/right, history, delete key, etc. (Tab completion of Haskell identifiers is the most glaring omission.) -Judah