It has two problems: 1- It is "a very straightforward wrapper". It's not very Haskell-friendly. Which might be a good thing or not, I'm not yet sure. It could use some more type-safety. 2- It won't allow you to do work on a thread separate from your message-loop thread, as any self-respecting Windows program should always do. I hope GHC might support that in the future (supporting bound threads), but I'm not sure what/if there are any plans about it. "ihope", you might want to try the bindings I used when the Win32 library was broken in 6.4.0: http://www.JCABs-Rumblings.com/files/Win32Haskell.zip (650K) It's not perfect, and it's by no means complete, but I think it's a bit better organized and readable than the standard Win32 library you get with GHC, and it's much more type-safe, and it's pure Haskell with FFI (no C or greencard or anything) so it might give you a better clue about how FFI works. It is very simple, actually. Look for all the Foreign.hs files, and see how the functions defined there are used elsewhere. You won't find any documentation in there, of course. Compile the two silly programs with GHC 6.4.2 like this: ghc -optl-mwindows -fglasgow-exts -fallow-undecidable-instances -fallow-overlapping-instances -lKernel32 -lUser32 -lGdi32 -lOle32 -lComctl32 -optc-D_WIN32_IE=0x700 -optc-D_WIN32_WINNT=0x600 --make -o Win32Test.exe Win32Test.hs ghc -optl-mwindows -fglasgow-exts -fallow-undecidable-instances -fallow-overlapping-instances -lKernel32 -lUser32 -lGdi32 -lOle32 -lComctl32 -optc-D_WIN32_IE=0x700 -optc-D_WIN32_WINNT=0x600 --make -o DictDisp1.exe DictDisp1.hs Remove the "-optl-mwindows" if you want the compiler to run on a console, so you can see the stdout spew. Any comments are very welcome, but make sure you copy me directly or I might not catch them :). And let me know if this helps. JCAB Neil Mitchell wrote:

Hi,

Pretty much every Haskell implementation supports the FFI - its a standardised Haskell 98 extension. Take a look at the System.Win32 library which is a wrapper round the Windows API. If you have a reference to the Win32 API (i.e. MSDN) then the API looks like a very straightforward wrapper.

Thanks

Neil

On 5/2/06, ihope wrote:

...

Ello. I'm looking for a way to interface the Windows API with Haskell in order to write a Win32 console handler thingy. I don't know anything about the Haskell Foreign Function Interface beyond what its name implies and that it's an extension to Haskell 98 (or is it?). So just where do I start?

--ihope _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

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