[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANN: haskell-src-exts 0.3.2

[Thomas Davie]

On 17 Mar 2008, at 23:41, Niklas Broberg wrote:

>> Could this be used to add support for refactoring of source files
>> containing language extensions?
>>
>> Because if I'm correct, the current most popular refactoring  
>> solution (I
>> forgot the name) for Haskell does not support extensions.
>
> I supppose you're talking about HaRe, that Thomas Schilling linked to.
> I have no idea how that system is built so I can't answer your
> question. But in principle I don't see why not. :-)

I believe that the limitation is that they use Programatica's parser  
to get an AST to run their refactorings on.  I think they've looked  
several times at using ghc's apis to do this, but hit various  
problems.  I think that the main problem is that no other parser  
preserves things like code layout and commenting, which is of course  
pretty critical to refactoring programs in a sane kind of way.

Thanks

Tom