On Mon, 11 Dec 2000, Simon Marlow wrote:

In principle, yes. But there are several stages to GHC's compilation cycle; where exactly the user-specified preprocessing stage would fit in is something we'd need to discuss.

Aren't there only two reasonably "standard" and "portable" stages: just before and just after unliteration? And unliteration itself is a kind of such source preprocessing. So it's really a question of specifying the order of preprocessings. When multiple preprocessors are being applied, it's not obvious what extensions to use. I tried to allow such stacking in my hsc2hs preprocessor by letting it accept any name ending in "c" and creating the output file with this "c" removed, thus turning foo.hsc into foo.hs and foo.lhsc into foo.lhs. Perhaps it would be better to mark a source to be preprocessed by appending a whole new extension with its own dot instead of modifying the old extension, like autoconf turning config.h.in into config.h. Preprocessors in general may produce more files. For example hsc2hs sometimes produces .c and .h files as well. This requires a naming convention too. It would be cool if Makefiles could be avoided in simple cases, or at least be simpler. I just want ghc to do the right thing with all kinds of files. ghc --make looks promising. -- Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk