Treatment of unknown pragmas

Tue Oct 16 23:02:02 UTC 2018

I think Brandon may have misread your example as "{-# HLINT ... #-}".

One problem with "{- HLINT" (although I'm personally not in favor of the special-casing) is that if it's just a Haskell comment then it itself is vulnerable to typos. E.g. if I type "{- HILNT foo -}" (L and I swapped), hlint the tool will miss it.

Tom

> El 16 oct 2018, a las 18:44, Simon Peyton Jones via ghc-devs <ghc-devs at haskell.org> escribió:
> 
> I’m still not getting it.  GHC ignores everything between {- and -}.  Why would I  need to produce a new GHC if someone wants to us {- WIMWAM blah -}?
>  
> Simon
>  
> From: Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com> 
> Sent: 16 October 2018 23:39
> To: Simon Peyton Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com>
> Cc: Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>; Neil Mitchell <ndmitchell at gmail.com>; ghc-devs at haskell.org Devs <ghc-devs at haskell.org>
> Subject: Re: Treatment of unknown pragmas
>  
> One problem is you have to release a new ghc every time someone comes up with a new pragma-using tool that starts to catch on. Another is that the more of these you have, the more likely a typo will inadvertently match some tool you don't even know about but ghc does.
>  
> On Tue, Oct 16, 2018 at 6:34 PM Simon Peyton Jones via ghc-devs <ghc-devs at haskell.org> wrote:
> I’m still not understanding what’s wrong with
>  
> {- HLINT blah blah -}
>  
> GHC will ignore it.  HLint can look at it.  Simple.
>  
> I must be missing something obvious.
>  
> Simon
>  
> From: ghc-devs <ghc-devs-bounces at haskell.org> On Behalf Of Simon Marlow
> Sent: 16 October 2018 21:44
> To: Neil Mitchell <ndmitchell at gmail.com>
> Cc: ghc-devs <ghc-devs at haskell.org>
> Subject: Re: Treatment of unknown pragmas
>  
> I suggested to Neil that he add the {-# HLINT #-} pragma to GHC. It seemed like the least worst option taking into account the various issues that have already been described in this thread. I'm OK with adding HLINT; after all we already ignore OPTIONS_HADDOCK, OPTIONS_NHC98, a bunch of other OPTIONS, CFILES (a Hugs relic), and several more that GHC ignores.
>  
> We can either
> (a) not protect people from mistyped pragmas, or
> (b) protect people from mistyped pragma names, but then we have to bake in the set of known pragmas
>  
> We could choose to have a different convention for pragmas that GHC doesn't know about (as Ben suggests), but then of course we don't get any protection for mistyped pragma names when using that convention.
>  
> Cheers
> Simon
>  
>  
> On Tue, 16 Oct 2018 at 21:12, Neil Mitchell <ndmitchell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > A warning flag is an interesting way to deal with the issue. On the
> > other hand, it's not great from an ergonomic perspective; afterall, this
> > would mean that all users of HLint (and any other tool requiring special
> 
> Yep, this means every HLint user has to do an extra thing. I (the
> HLint author) now have a whole pile of "how do I disable warnings in
> Stack", and "what's the equivalent of this in Nix". Personally, it ups
> the support level significantly that I wouldn't go this route.
> 
> I think it might be a useful feature in general, as new tools could
> use the flag to prototype new types of warning, but I imagine once a
> feature gets popular it becomes too much fuss.
> 
> > > I think it makes a lot of sense to have a standard way for third-parties
> > > to attach string-y information to Haskell source constructs. While it's
> > > not strictly speaking necessary to standardize the syntax, doing
> > > so minimizes the chance that tools overlap and hopefully reduces
> > > the language ecosystem learning curve.
> >
> > This sounds exactly like the existing ANN pragma, which is what I've wanted LiquidHaskell to move towards for a long time. What is wrong with using the ANN pragma?
> 
> Significant compilation performance penalty and extra recompilation.
> ANN pragmas is what HLint currently uses.
> 
> >  I'm a bit skeptical of this idea. Afterall, adding cases to the
> > lexer for every tool that wants a pragma seems quite unsustainable.
> 
> I don't find this argument that convincing. Given the list already
> includes CATCH and DERIVE, the bar can't have been _that_ high to
> entry. And yet, the list remains pretty short. My guess is the demand
> is pretty low - we're just whitelisting a handful of additional words
> that aren't misspellings.
> 
> Thanks, Neil
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>  
> --
> brandon s allbery kf8nh
> allbery.b at gmail.com
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