Friends
The use of flags to control rewrite rules in GHC is very confusing. Several
bug reports arise from this. There is a summary here:
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2497
The final comment is a proposal, which I append below. This email is just to
allow others to comment on the proposed change. It's all minor and tiresome,
but I don't want to change it and then find it's still awkward.
NB: please read the whole ticket if you want to comment on these proposals.
And add your comments to the ticket.
Simon
* Do not add -XRewriteRules. A RULE is in a pragma, and so is silently
ignored by other compilers anyway. Other pragmas like SPECIALISE do not have a
language extension flag. They will generate errors if they are plain wrong
(e.g. variables out of scope). But adding a language flag would be inconsistent.
* Inside a RULE, switch on the forall-as-keyword in the lexer,
unconditionally. Simon M will do this, and send a patch to Simon PJ for
validation.
* Merge the -XScopedTypeVariables and -XPatternSignatures flags.
Distinguishing them isn't senseless, but it's jolly confusing.
* Inside a RULE, switch on -XScopedTypeVariables unconditionally.
* Change -frewrite-rules to -fuse-rewrite-rules; deprecate the former.
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