Telling ghc where to start

George Russell ger@tzi.de
Fri, 28 Sep 2001 18:20:17 +0200


There are various reasons why one might have a Haskell file which doesn't have the
expected "Module.hs" filename, in particular when putting ghc into some larger
system which does its own thing with files.  I may well want this as part of UniForM
in the next few months.  However ghc doesn't provide anyway support for this, and while
you could create a symbolic link with a name ghc approves of to the real file, that seems
somewhat messy.  gcc has an option which allows you to specify that the input is, say,
a C program (even though it's called "hello.txt") but it's rather messy and might take too
long to implement.  I suggest instead a new option called
   -virtual-name
or something similar, so that
   ghc -virtual-name Module.hs /blah/horrible932
will compile the contents of /blah/horrible932, but treat it as if it were called "Module.hs".