[Haskell-beginners] Library source

[Dave Bayer]

On Mar 8, 2010, at 8:07 AM, Nicolas Couture-Grenier wrote:

> Where can I find the haskell sources of the standard library?

As others have said, it depends how you install GHC.

This is a bit of a sore point with Haskell, masked by the fact that many people use online sources. I like to code on airline flights and places I don't have wifi, so local HTML versions of source for all libraries is essential.

Even building from source, cabal install doesn't produce every possible conceivable source file in HTML format. There are proposed fixes but they haven't been adopted. I resort to a script that manually rips out all CABAL documentation then rebuilds it from scratch, every time I add a library. If I had more time I'd tweak this script to be more clever, but it works, and I'm busy.

There are some dated assumptions behind all this; some of us are old enough to remember days when hard disk capacities were a serious resource constraint. That is no longer true. It is inconceivable to me that today, anyone serious about Haskell cares about its modest disk footprint. But hey, old habits die hard.

Why can't we agree as a community that no matter how one obtains GHC, on any platform by any delivery means, the default should be to provide absolutely every single line of source code as linked HTML? I mean, we're a serious language, and isn't such a principle part of the definition of being a serious language?