"Simon Peyton-Jones"
And indeed such a thing might be more generally useful, across all Haskell implementations not just GHC. Perhaps it should be
module System.Compiler where compilerName :: String releaseDate :: CalendarTime -- or (Day,Month,Year)? version :: (Int,Int) patchLevel :: Int
So then a program could ask whether it was being run by Hugs or GHC or whatever.
I remember Mark Jones suggesting more-or-less exactly this idea back in about 1998/1999. It has been implemented in nhc98 ever since, but I finally deleted it from CVS recently because no other systems supported it. And (probably the more major reason) because I frequently forgot to keep it up to date. Here was the signature: module Haskell where import Time import Locale systemName :: String -- "Hugs", "GHC", "hbc", "nhc", "qhc", ... haskellVersion :: Int -- 13, 14, 98, 2000, ... releaseDate :: CalendarTime -- ... version :: String -- some combination of the above
Questions: * Would this be a good thing to agree across compilers?
Yes.
* What should the interface be? I gave one possibility above; George gives another.
I'm agnostic. Regards, Malcolm