Hi Niklas, nice to meet you.
Likewise. :-)
I'm planning to extend shim to get a more featured ide (vim / emacs.. Maybe the Eclipse supporters do join as well?)
One thing I'd like to add is adding modules/ import statements to a module. Do you think your' parsers / resulting abstract syntax tree is suited to add some import statements? Or do you suggest hacking my own fuzzy approach?
I'd say that's definitely a good use of haskell-src-exts, and very easy to accomplish. A fuzzy approach sounds scary to me. ;-)
Is it easy to explain the main difference between your output and the output produced by the GHC parser?
I'd say the most striking difference is that the AST used by haskell-src-exts is much much simpler than the GHC one. It's only an AST, it doesn't try to cater to the different passes of a compiler to do renaming or any such nonsense. It is also contained in a single module so it is easy to reference (try digging up where some specific constructor in the GHC AST is defined and you'll appreciate the merit of this). For any project that just needs to parse/fiddle with/print haskell source code, I see very little reason to choose GHC API instead of haskell-src-exts. The only reason is of course that GHC API is guaranteed to be up to date with the latest GHC, and will be able to parse exactly everything that GHC does. On the other hand, haskell-src-exts allows you to handle regular patterns and literal XML syntax a la HSP, which GHC doesn't. :-) Cheers, /Niklas