interpreter features

[Manuel M. T. Chakravarty]

"Simon Peyton-Jones" <simonpj@microsoft.com> wrote,

> | What about my idea? Can't there be a module, say called 
> | *interpreter* which 
> | you can add and remove definitions from on-the-fly?
> | Something that would put you tighter in the loop. Without 
> | having to go back 
> | to the editor edit stuff, reload from interpreter, choke on 
> | error, see what 
> | went wrong, etc. Just scratch some code on the CLI, see what 
> | you've defined 
> | so far, edit the current module, and evaluate what you want 
> | to. 
> 
> So the CLI would have to have a way to show you what the 
> current "interpreter" module was, and let you edit it.  How 
> does that differ from an editor?   This smells like a tarpit to
> me: once you provide a basic editor, everyone will want more
> features.  Better, surely, to use an existing editor?

Definitely.  An environment like this is pretty trivial todo
in Emacs.  In fact, the Emacs Haskell mode does most of that
already anyway.

Manuel