Re: [Haskell-cafe] Human-friendly compiler errors for GHC

On 2008 Jul 13, at 9:36, Max Bolingbroke wrote:

2008/7/13 Claus Reinke :

...

Then again, we don't do fuzzy matching, only completion of partial identifiers and suggesting possible qualified names and imports for unqualified ones.

Agreed: doing fuzzy matching on >every< available identifier from all packages would truly suck. I would propose just looking for exact matches in non-imported modules for identifiers that are not in scope.

I would fuzzy match on unqualified names in the current module (or directory), qualified names in the module in question, and if that doesn't exist (== have a .hi) then try fuzzy-matching the module name. If the unqualified fuzzy match doesn't work, look for exact matches in non-imported modules.

Well, noone has actually said they think fuzzy matching would be useful yet, so I suspect this patch is dead on the vine :). I've filed

Huh? Edit distance is a good way to handle typoes --- and, while some people have asserted that "we don't need that because I can see it already", most people *don't* see it right away. (I do tend to spot typoes quickly --- in prose. It's nowhere near as accurate for code, and even when it does work it isn't exact: I'll have a "something's wrong" about some spot in the code and still take an hour to spot the typo.) I'm also *really* good at typoes, which you won't see in email but will see regularly in #haskell. :) -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH