On Feb 12, 2006, at 5:42 PM, Claus Reinke wrote:
... these days, there is some momentum for providing Haskell with various tools for refactoring, documentation, profiling, tracing, instance generators, analyzers, pre-processors for extensions, editor modes, interactive interfaces (textual, graphical, visual), .. and even first ides, but all that is hampered by the lack of a standardized interface to functionality that exists in every single Haskell implementation: parsing, type checking, AST, (pretty printing,) semantic information, (evaluation).
that functionality is common to most tools, hard (and unneccessary) work to reimplement, and almost impossible to keep up to date, diverting precious man-power from small teams trying to provide much needed tools.
I agree strongly with the need for a standard parser/AST/typechecker to enable tools and extensions. That's why Fortress contains an AST specification! So naturally I'd love it if Haskell had one, too. It should probably include: * Parser * Standard AST types (which might be extended in particular implementations) * Type checker which produces a decorated AST (again, extended in particular implementations) * A renamer turns out to be awfully useful/necessary; this raises the sticky question of how imports are specified. It'd be nice *not* to have to dredge up the old .hi files, as they tended to require compilers to extend the .hi format in really non-standard ways. -Jan-Willem Maessen