One of the emacs modes for Haskell gives the type of the identifier the cursor is in in the modeline. It does this by examining the type signatures in the current file, and having the prelude type signatures built-in. This is quite helpful, if incomplete, and fairly easy to implement.
Similar shortcuts are possible for other aspects, and might help to produce something useful within the constraints of an MSc project. Finding a reasonable compromise between producing something for an MSc and producing something that will remain in use and that others could build on later would be the first challenge, I think. Personally, I couldn't care less about yet another non-portable IDE demo bound to one specific, non-standard, smallish editor and one specific graphics library with one specific OS. It might get a small user base, but is likely to be out of date before it can grow to a functionality that could attract more users. But that's just my personal opinion.. The results of this survey and your own thoughts about what the specific issues in a Haskell Programming Environment might be, what functionality should be provided, and how, have a greater likelihood to be of lasting value. If you want to produce anything "real", you will want to reuse the language knowledge built into existing implementations. If you then want to remain portable, a good route would be to define an interface between the HPE and some Haskell implementation, specifying exactly which functionality the HPE would want to access, and how. Examples: - syntax-awareness. Experience with syntax-directed editors shows that users don't like to be locked into the syntax, they want some leeway for errors in intermediate stages. Also, many programmers don't want to drop their favourite, productive, proven and portable editor for the ones built into IDEs. Still, the editor should be aware of the syntax of the current language (those regular-expression-based syntax-highlighters are nothing but a stop-gap measure). Having a standard interface to the implementation's parser (where is the next subexpression? where is next enclosing context? where and what is the next syntax error?..). - scope&type awareness. A natural extension of the above with an interface to the implementation's symbol table (where is the binding occurence for this variable? what the type of this expression? what are the constructors/class instances for this type? which identifiers with which types are exported from this module?..) - other language-specific interactions. (evaluate current expression in current environment; browse module graph; browse class graph; compile&run; instrument for debugging;..) Have a look at the functionality provided in Hugs and try to define an interface that could support that functionality from within a standard editor, without being dependent on Hugs. There used to be an idea of having a more modular Haskell implementation with interfaces between all parts, including an interface between Hugs-like frontend and background compiler and runtime system (part of the Haskell Execution Platform, HEP;-). That got rescheduled to low priority, but might still be a useful starting point (http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/papers/hep.ps.gz). Of course, that would be only one side of a modular HPE. The other half would be to make sure that standard programmer editors (Emacs, VIM, ..) get the necessary stub functionality to make use of the interfaces. And finally, both Haskell implementers and Editor developers would need to be convinced to support those interfaces.. After that, implementing and adding functionality using the editor and implementation interfaces would be the lesser problem. The really good IDEs are either built on meta-programming and reflective facilities in the underlying programming language or integrated into one particular implementation. Trying to guess types and syntax is either a lot of work (duplicating what has gone into existing implementations) or just a hack. Claus