Benjamin Franksen wrote:
On Tuesday 30 May 2006 20:59, Brian Hulley wrote:
It is quite a tall order to provide immediate typed feedback of an
edit buffer that will in general be syntactically incomplete but this
is my eventual aim.
One issue in the area of immediate feedback is that Haskell's syntax
is troublesome in a few areas. Consider:
foo :: SomeClass a => a -> a
when the user has just typed:
foo :: SomeClass a
should the editor assume SomeClass is a Tycon or a class name?
If SomeClass has been defined somewhere (in the same buffer or in some
imported module), the editor will know whether it is a class or a type
and can react accordingly (e.g. propose to insert '=>' or use a
special color for 'SomeClass'). If not, then the editor should remain
agnostic. What is the problem here? No user will expect the editor to
unambigously parse /incomplete/ code, or will they?
But the buffer will nearly always be incomplete as you're editing it.
I was kind of hoping that the syntax of Haskell could be changed so that for
any sequence of characters there would be a unique parse that had a minimum
number of "gaps" inserted by the editor to create a complete parse tree, and
moreover that this parse could be found by deterministic LL1 recursive
descent.
Haskell already seems so very close to having this property - its a real
pity about =>
The problem is: when Haskell was designed, no one seems to have thought
about the syntax from the point of view of making it easy to parse or
ensuring that it would have this nice property for editing.
foo :: {SomeClass a} a->a
a Prelude.+ b -- no spaces in the qvarsym
a `Prelude.(+)` b -- a little generalization
a `Prelude.(+) b -- no need for closing `
I would not like an editor that forces me to use a special coding
style (like using brackets where not strictly necessary). Even less
would I like to use one that introduces non-standard syntax.
My humble opinion is that you'll have to bite the bullet and implement
your syntax recognizer so that it conforms to Haskell'98 (including
the approved addenda) [and addtionally however many of the existing
extensions you'll manage to support]. It may be more difficult but in
the end will also be a lot more useful. And you'll have to find a way
to (unobtrusively!) let the user know whether some piece of code does
not yet have enough context to parse it unambigously.
Thanks for the feedback - I suppose I was being overly optimistic to think I
could just change the language to suit my editor ;-).
I'll have to find a balance between what I'm able to implement and what is
specified in Haskell98 (or Haskell' etc) - just as GHCi has done with
qvarsym, and perhaps have different levels of conformance to H98 so people
could choose their preferred balance between conformity and
instantaneousness of feedback (everything would of course still be
loaded/saved as H98).
Regards, Brian.
--
Logic empowers us and Love gives us purpose.
Yet still phantoms restless for eras long past,
congealed in the present in unthought forms,
strive mightily unseen to destroy us.
http://www.metamilk.com
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