On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 2:56 AM, nml
How about moving the messages for compiler to an additional file?
My motivation is that we often face a trade-off between aesthetical(elegant code) and practical(efficient code). Like pragmas and strictness annotations, I often feel they make the source code ugly. They don't affect the semantics of our programs, do they?
Some people would say this beautifying should be accomplished by an editor, like hiding/showing option for those information.
But such separation has additional benefits. For instance, making the source code more compiler-independent. (yeah, this is not the case with language-extensions) And we avoid dispersing those information among our lines. (or even files) In some cases, it would be convenient.
I'm not sure if this idea is reasonable, reachable or just naive. Suggestions?
Best regards -nml _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
One problem is that in many cases, the things that you're talking about DO affect semantics. Consider strictness annotations:
f (!x) = Just x g x = Just x h (Just _) = True h Nothing = False
Now h (f _|_) == _|_, but h (g _|_) == True, even though a strictness annotation was the only difference between them. (For those not already familiar with it, _|_ ("bottom") is a semantically undefined value, equivalent to an infinite loop.) I agree that it's good to reduce semantically-irrelevant code, but I'm not sure how feasible the proposal would be. I think GHC's rewrite rules may be of interest in this problem (the debate between elegant and fast code). Don Stewart has also written about this issue and has a couple of really good posts on his blog (http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/blog/2008/05/16#fast). Warm regards, Alex