On 2006-09-24 at 01:59BST "Neil Mitchell" wrote:
As a side note, perhaps if you're shoving massive amounts of text into a Haskell source file you want to either move to something more structured (like haskell source extensions),
IIRC the original problem was MySQL statements, which really call out for something structured. Having them as strings throws away potential compile-time checks.
or if it really is just some large constant, then put it in a separate file.
That reminds me of an idea I've had rumbling about in my head for some time: files as constants. It goes something like this: A module may import a directory (folder?) using some special syntax (or hypothetical module name), and all the files in the directory become names available to the module. In the simplest version, the files would just correspond to names of type String, but more structure would be possible (and probably desirable). So, let's suppose that the directory D contains files foo and bar, a module could say something like import ConstantFiles/D (foo) main = putStr foo and the compiler would instruct the linker that D/foo was to be included in the resulting programme (possibly at load time?) bound to the name foo. There are plenty of details to be worked out (including what mapping for filenames to variable names, encodings - which the compiler would have to check, searchpath resolution, ...), which is why I've not got round to posting this before, but I think the idea has potential. Jón -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk