ghc command line arguments parsing

[Harendra Kumar]

On 18 August 2016 at 20:51, Sven Panne <svenpanne at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2016-08-17 16:37 GMT+02:00 Harendra Kumar <harendra.kumar at gmail.com>:
>
>> ghc accepts a flag and its argument as a single quoted or escaped
>> argument as well. For example all of the following are equivalent:
>>
>> ghc -package foo
>> ghc "-package foo"
>> ghc -package\ foo
>>
>> Is this by design or accidental?
>>
>
> I would call this a bug, probably some missing quoting somewhere: Most
> commands I know don't do splitting on the arguments for themselves. Just
> try e.g.
>
>    gcc "-v -v"
>

Initially I too thought the same but then I did some more testing and it
turned out that the way ghc does not really parse it exactly in the same
way as independent unquoted arguments. It only parses a flag which takes an
argument. For example:
ghc "-package foo" -- parses foo as an argument to the -package flag
ghc "-package foo -v" -- is not the same as "-package foo" and "-v"
arguments passed independently, it is "foo -v" as the argument to "-package"

So it essentially allows packing a flag and its argument together. Which
provides a nice way to pass flags and their values as a single unit. This
may be accidental to begin with but I liked this just because it makes
passing opaque flags combined with arguments from a wrapper program like
runghc much more convenient. I cannot think of any downside of this
behavior unless someone points out otherwise.


>
>> This has a nice side effect to make passing ghc arguments via rughc
>> simple. For example runghc "-package foo" or runghc -package\ foo will pass
>> "-package foo" to ghc. The alternative and documented way to achieve the
>> same effect is runghc -package --ghc-arg=foo which is not that convenient.
>>
>> My question is - can we rely on this way of parsing? If it is not by
>> design, does it make sense to legalize and therefore document this?
>>
>
> And my question is: Can we fix this bug? :-D If this is not considered a
> bug, we should be very explicit about this deviation from standard behavior
> in the documentation, including the reasons for it.
>

As I explained above, I would prefer to keep this bug :-) and document it
especially for runghc as a better alternative to --ghc-arg=foo . So instead
of saying:

runghc -package --ghc-arg=text -package --ghc-arg=turtle hello.hs
We can just say:

runghc "-package text" "-package turtle" hello.hs

 -harendra
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