[Haskell-cafe] Current status of Mavericks CPP

[Sven Panne]

2014-04-16 12:34 GMT+02:00 Ben Franksen <ben.franksen at online.de>:
> [...]Has nobody ever written a paper about how to extend Haskell with the few
> features we actually need from CPP? I think general macro replacement like
> CPP offers is not on the list, right? IIUC, CPP is used in Haskell libraries
> almost exclusively for conditional compilation. [...]

Nope: https://github.com/haskell-opengl/OpenGLRaw/blob/master/include/HsOpenGLRaw.h

Perhaps some template Haskell magic might work nowadays, bug there was
no TH at all when the bindings started, and I am not sure if I should
tie this package to GHC. The real solution is generating the binding
via the OpenGL XML spec, anyway, but I somehow have to do some real
(non-Haskell) work for real money. ;-)

My point is: Do we really know that conditional compilation is *the*
use case? I remember that in ancient days macros were used to generate
instances etc. Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.