"H. Conrad Cunningham" wrote:
>
> I am teaching a course on functional programming using Hugs98 and
> Simon Thompson's textbook (combined with a set of notes I wrote a few
> years ago).
>
> One of my students (an excellent programmer but who is new to
> functional programming) complained to me today about the lack of
> comprehensive and comprehensible reference documentation on the
> "standard" Haskell and Hugs libraries. When he goes searching for
> functionality that is possibly in the library, he has difficulty
> finding the functions because of the lack of a good index and if he
> does find something, the documentation tends to be terse and cryptic
> for the relatively new Haskell programmer. I tend to agree with him!
> Have we overlooked something that has been produced in the
> Haskell/Hugs community?
I agree! The documentation of the libraries is currently poor.
We know, and here is the gameplan:
(1) Simon M pulled together a number of Haskell
libraries (a superset of the current Hugs/GHC libs)
into a common structure of modules. This includes various useful
things, like collections, pretty printing, parsing, etc.
(2) These libraries are being documented via a docbook infrastructure.
Reuben T is leading this effort.
(3) There are plans for a javadoc like package, where you
specify things using pragmas.
GHC 4.06 was released with a version of these libraries.
The next STG Hugs will include (most of) these libraries.
Because STG Hugs shares a backend with GHC, this is actually
not too difficult. (The next STG Hugs is due out in a month or so).
We are also talking to York about nhc also being able to compile
these libraries.
There are no plans to retro-fit Classic Hugs with the new
libraries.
You might want to look at the old (4.04?) GHC documentation,
which did talk about the old libraries.
Hope this helps,
Andy Gill
