In principle I can do this, but:
1. how do I hide the import of show String to replace it w/ my own?
2. If I do replce show String what else will break?
3. If instead I define an eshow function that strips "", how do I minimize
the perforamnce hit of quote stripping?
4. If I want to share my code, I have to share both the actual codebase as
well as the preprocessor code. This seems like sucha basic language
syntax issue that I shouldn't have to worry about which version of haskell
your collaborators are running. Everyone writing their own preprocessor
will severely balkanize the language.
5. How does the use of this pre-processor interact w/ tools like Derive
and PolyP which are also implemented as preprocessors?
That being said, I would be happy to take a shot at HacWrite if it had a
shot of becoming part of the language definition (or if it was a standard
part of the various haskell distributions: ghc, hugs, hbc,etc.) and if
Magnus would allow it.
Is there a good lanugage reason to object to this feature? It seems like
a no brainer imprpovement.
-Alex-
___________________________________________________________________
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On Tue, 8 Jun 1999, Lennart Augustsson wrote:
> "S. Alexander Jacobson" wrote:
>
> > HacWrite certainly seems like an improvement over Haskell.
> > However, it is just not as good as the scripting languages.
> > HacWrite still requires the author to differentiate between strings and
> > other types, still requires explicit use of show and still requires more
> > typing and curly balancing. Isn't this nicer?
> >
> > "insert into mytable values (NULL,'$var1','$(var2+var3)','$var3')
> >
>
> So add your own little modification to HacWrite. It would be easy enough
> to add $ interpolation.
>
> -- Lennart
>
>
