"Talking" with the compiler

[Simon Marlow]

> Am 18.01.2004 um 11:31 schrieb Ketil Malde:
> 
> > HNBeck at t-online.de (Hans Nikolaus Beck) writes:
> >
> >> in order to build a programming environement, it would be 
> nice to ask
> >> the GHC about symbols etc found in a given Haskell program.
> >
> > I suppose a programming environment could talk to GHCi 
> (which provides
> > commands like :type, :info, :browse to explore the currently defined
> > symbols)?
> 
> I've look shortly at the GHCi documentation. So I think it would be 
> possible to include a "GHC engine" into a IDE application by 
> redirecting input and output from GHCi to pipes (I rembemer 
> that emacs 
> used something similar for doing it's compile stuff). But that's 
> hardcore UNIX,  I've forgot how to do that  :-(((

For the Visual Studio plugin we're going to need to talk to GHCi.  We
plan to do this by designing an appropriate API for GHCi and calling it
directly; you *could* do it by talking over a pipe, but it's going to be
a lot of work (and slow).  If you want to do this, please talk to us
about what API you'd like to see, and we can hopefully implement
something that will be generally useful.

Cheers,
	Simon