On 10 October 2005 14:12, Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
Am Montag, 10. Oktober 2005 11:55 schrieb Niklas Broberg:
[...]
Using a shell script is a possible work-around, but certainly not *the* solution. If there is no real reason for ghc to spit out a.out files, then surely choosing the exe name from the main input file would simplify a programmer's life. And for applications that desperately want a.out, well, there's still the -o flag, right?
Maybe the makers of GHC wanted GHC to be "GCC compatible".
There's no really deep reason for this choice, other than it being what GHC does normally - i.e. the default binary has always been a.out (main.exe on Windows) unless -o is given. I don't see enough of a compelling reason to change it, sorry. It's not broken, just slightly inconvenient. Cheers, Simon