On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Mauricio
I would like to write a Haskell pretty-printer, using standard libraries for that. How can I check if the original and the pretty-printed versions are the same? For instance, is there a file generated by GHC at the compilation pipe that is always guaranteed to have the same MD5 hash when it comes from equivalent source?
Compare .hi files?
That was my first thought, but can I be sure .hi files are going to be exactly the same, i.e., isn't there some kind of information (timestamps?) that can change without changes in the code?
For that matter, the code can change without the .hi file doing so, eg. if a pragma noinline'd function is altered without changing its type/strictness - or a function the optimizer decides is just pointless to try inlining, for all I know.