On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 05:20:54PM -0400, David F. Place wrote:
Hi, All.
I needed to make a batch of edits to some input files after a big change in my program. Normally, one would choose some scripting language, but I can't bear to program in them. The nasty thing about using Haskell is that giving regexes as string constants sometime requires two levels of quoting. For instance. (mkRegex "\\\\\\\\") matches \\.
I've been tempted to write a preprocessor that would accept Python-like strings, such as r'foo' (raw, with no backslash interpolation). And while we're at it, transform things like "Hi there, ${name}!" into "Hi there, " ++ name ++ "!" A dumb preprocessor should not be all that hard to write, I should think. Oh, also the """here docs""" would also be lovely.
To get around that, I put the regexes in the head of a literate program and let the program gobble itself up. Works great! I think I'll always turn to Haskell for my scripting needs now.
Whoa, that is sneaky and clever. But it will fail the minute you try to run this on a compiled program, because then getProgName will give you the binary executable. -- John