"Simon Marlow" writes:

I'm slightly inclined not to make this change, but I could be swayed if there was enough interest in it. What I'm seeing so far is not overwhelming support for the change. Simon PJ is in favour, though.

"a.out" is tradition, of course, but OTOH, I don't think anybody actually depends on it. Could it perhaps be made optional, either through a config file (.ghc?) or an environment variable, or some such? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants

On 2005-10-11 at 09:49BST "Simon Marlow" wrote:

On 11 October 2005 06:29, Tomasz Zielonka wrote:

...

It wasn't meant to be a bug report, only a feature request ;-)

Actually, I was mostly interested if anyone would mind if GHC chose the name based on the top-level module.

Would you accept the patch?

I'm slightly inclined not to make this change, but I could be swayed if there was enough interest in it. What I'm seeing so far is not overwhelming support for the change. Simon PJ is in favour, though.

a.out has always irriteted me. I /never/ want an executable called that, and from time to time I try to run "top-level-module" and then curse that I haven't used -o. Looking now I find I have an a.out in my haskell directory, and I haven't the faintest idea what it is, so the only thing to do with it is delete it. The name "a.out" is meaningless too. It flies in the face of Haskell's approach to giving things sensible names. On this system ghc produces ELF format executables, so it doesn't even signify whatever historical format a.out used to be. Just what are the advantages of keeping this? Jón -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk