"Yang"
however, i found to my surprise that hat doesn't actually support any libraries outside the ones.
We are all too painfully aware of this particular shortcoming of Hat. Just about everyone in Haskell now uses pre-packaged libraries, but Hat does not (easily) support them yet. Sorry, but the best advice I can give is to wait until the Hat developers fix this!
for something like hscurses, which provides bindings to the ncurses c library and is partly written in hsc, is there still a way to use it without subjecting myself to too much pain?
It is possible, but for a beginner in Haskell I expect the work involved to be too unpleasant. Here is a different suggestion that may help to solve your immediate problem. You only want to see the order of calls to I/O functions in the library. So you could manually create a wrapper for every function, that writes a message to a logfile before calling the original function. Then just call the wrappers instead of the originals. (It is easy to give the wrappers the same name as the original function, by using module qualification, so you can swap between logging and non-logging versions later on.) Example: module HsCurses where foo :: Foo -> Blargh -> IO Foo bar :: Bar -> Baz -> IO () module WrappedCurses where import qualified HsCurses foo a b = do appendFile "logfile" ("foo "++show a++show b) HsCurses.foo a b bar a b = do appendFile "logfile" ("bar "++show a++show b) HsCurses.bar a b module Main where --import HsCurses -- choose between original import WrappedCurses -- or logging version Regards, Malcolm