I did this about 5 or 6 years ago for vim, and I'm so used to it I
wouldn't want to live without it. So I definitely recommend just
doing it. It was surprisingly easy to implement, it only took a few
hours, and then a day or so to refine the details.
I used haskell-src-exts for parsing and ghc-pkg for all visible
modules. By far the slowest part is haskell-src-exts. I have some
basic local preferences to resolve name clashes, and with that using
the global package list has never been much of a problem. If it were
I could use a local sandbox.
I don't have any fancy suggestion list, just pick the most likely. I
edit the import by hand if it was wrong, which is rare enough that I
don't mind.
On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 11:27 AM, John Williams
I have an idea for a tool I'd like to implement, and I'm looking for advice on the best way to do it.
Ideally, I want to write an Emacs extension where, if I'm editing Haskell code and I try to use a symbol that's not defined or imported, it will try to automatically add an appropriate import for the symbol. If instance, if I have "import Data.Maybe (isNothing)" in my module, and I try to call "isJust", the extension would automatically change the import to "import Data.Maybe (isJust, isNothing)".
The Emacs part is easy, but the Haskell part has me kind of lost. Basically I want to figure out how to heuristically resolve a name, using an existing set of imports as hints and constraints. The main heuristic I'd like to implement is that, if some symbols are imported from a module M, consider importing additional symbols from M. A more advanced heuristic might suggest that if a symbol is exported from a module M in a visible package P, the symbol should be imported from M. Finally, if a symbol is exported by a module in the Haskell platform, I'd like to suggest adding the relevant package as a dependency in the .cabal and/or stack.yaml file, and adding an import for it in the .hs file.
Here are some implementation options I'm considering:
1. Add a ghci command to implement my heuristics directly, since ghc already understands modules, packages and import statements. 2. Load a modified version of the source file into ghci where imports like "import M (...)" are replaced with "import M", and parse the error messages about ambiguous symbols. 3. Write a separate tool that reads Haskell imports and duplicates ghc and cabal's name resolution mechanisms. 4. Write a tool that reads Haskell imports and suggests imports from a list of commonly imported symbols, ignoring which packages are actually visible.
Right now the options that look best to me are 2 and 4, because the don't require me to understand or duplicate big parts of ghc, but if modifying ghc isn't actually that hard, then maybe 1 is the way to go. Option 3 might be a good way to go if there are libraries I can use to do the hard work for me.
Any thoughts?
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