Tom Shackell
As far as I know the FFI doesn't stipulate what you might have as a calling convention but it suggests all implementations should support "ccall" and "stdcall" where they make sense.
Yes, the FFI spec explicitly allows you to name any calling convention you care to think of, but states that if you use "ccall" or "stdcall", then the contents of the literal string must conform to the FFI spec for ccall/stdcall, and of course do the right thing. So you are free to develop any new calling convention, like "javascript", and to define what is permitted in the literal string for that convention. Ideally, if defined fully, this could later be added to the FFI spec to ensure that any other Haskell implementation that chooses to allow "javascript" would follow the same convention. nhc98/yhc already has the extra non-standard calling conventions "cast" and "noproto", whilst Hat has "haskell"(!) as an FFI convention.
Well the parser would need to be modified to understand 'javascript', perhaps the best way to do that is to say that any identifier is fine.
Actually, I think it would be better just to add the single new name "javascript". It's pretty easy, and allows us to represent the convention using an enumerated type internally, rather than just a String. Types are one of the reasons we like Haskell, aren't they?
If I remember correctly the 'external name' is just treated as a quoted string and can be anything you want so "new Data.getTime" should be parsed fine at the moment.
Indeed. Regards, Malcolm