[Haskell-cafe] Re: looking for origin of quote on preprocessors and language design

[Maciej Piechotka]

On Wed, 2010-01-13 at 22:42 +0100, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> Maciej Piechotka schrieb:
> >
> > Not quite. While I agree that "the *frequent* need for a preprocessor
> > shows omissions in (the design of) a language." it is not necessary the
> > case. Preprocessor may be useful if:
> >
> > - there is a new beatyful feature in newer version of compiler but you
> > still want to have backward compatibility.
> > - there are compiler or platform dependant elements. For example if you
> > write a driver in Haskell you may want to share code as much as possible
> > but you need to know 1) the size of registers and 2) the platform you're
> > writing as Windows have quite different API then Linux or BSD.
> > - You need to enable/disable features at build-time. It is not frequent
> > at closed-source system but it is frequent on OpenSource systems. For
> > example I might need to have minimal program for embedded system but
> > with full feature set it likly conquer the desktops
> >   
> Many of these problems are solved by preprocessor intervention in C/C++, 
> but there is often no need to do so. You could also write system 
> dependent modules, where the right module for your system is included by 
> the build system. I hope the build system does not count as a 
> preprocessor. In Haskell it is however still no fun to support multiple 
> versions of the base libraries, not to speak of different compilers - 
> and their set of libraries.
> 
> Unfortunately, the original question is still not answered.
> 

Hmm. May I ask how to do for example something depending on POSIX or
WinAPI? I am sorry but I cannot see how any of the above problems could
be solved.

Regards
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