Haskeline is designed to remove the readline dependency, because Windows does not have readline. So rlwrap is useless there. Andrew Hunter wrote:
On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 12:57:57PM -0800, Judah Jacobson wrote:
I'm pleased to announce the first release of ghci-haskeline. This package uses the GHC API to reimplement ghci with the Haskeline library as a backend. Haskeline is a library for line input in command-line programs, similar to readline or editline, which is written in Haskell and thus (hopefully) more easily integrated into other Haskell programs.
Perhaps this has already been discussed at length, in which case I apologize but, well, why provide line input editing at all?
A number of languages/programs (off the top of my head: sml, most Schemes) don't; the standard method to get line editing is rlwrap. And this works (in my limited experience) quite well. The disadvantage as I see it of using editline or Haskeline or whatever is that it's going to be sutbly different than other methods; presumably, people won't like the changes in behavior.
It seems to me that from a UNIX-y separation of concern view, the right thing to do (as many languages have chosen) is to /not/ provide line editing, and just let the user do that with any number of convenient tools that focus on getting/that/ right (like rlwrap.) Is there a reason we've not taken that approach?
Thanks, AHH