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I am currently co-developing a language[1] as an extension to Haskell, by means of a preprocessor to GHC. In this language we want to supply the programmer with a number of functions by default, as with the functions in the GHC Prelude. Is there some simple way to make GHC treat our own base library in the same magic way as the Prelude, so that it is always implicitly available?

Perhaps your preprocessor could just place a suitable 'import' in the generated Haskell module?

Indeed, and that is precisely what we are doing right now. And it's not really all that much work for us either, but I can envision other uses for such a feature as well, so my question still stands.

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And while I'm asking about magicks; In our language we have a special function, called "page", that we require be present in "executable" modules, much like a main-function. Once again, is there some way of tweaking GHC to check this for us?

Along the same lines: put something like this in the generated module

requirePage :: () requirePage = f page where f :: PageType -> () f _ = ()

Hmm, this is an interesting idea. I see a problem though, since (just like with main) we don't require just all modules to contain such a function, only the "executable" ones. That would correspond to the one that we invoke ghc (with the preprocessor) on, but ghc in turn will invoke the preprocessor on all modules that are loaded. In other terms, ghc can know which module is the first, but the preprocessor has no idea. Thanks for the input, /Niklas _________________________________________________________________ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail