"Talking" with the compiler

[Hans Nikolaus Beck]

Hi,

I agree.  It would be nice to have also a Iterator interface for the 
AST, i.e. for jump to next/previous symbol of a special kind. Also 
information about the caller of a symbol would be nice (I don't know if 
that is already part of the compiler manager interface).

I'm interested in code visualization and refactoring, so this all would 
be nice to have :-))

BTW:  My host system will be Squeak ...

greetings

Hans


Am 20.01.2004 um 11:32 schrieb Simon Marlow:

>
>> On Mon, 2004-01-19 at 11:34, Simon Marlow wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> I wanted something like that for a Haskell IDE I was working on (not
>> much progress on it at the moment, but I may pick it up again).
>>
>> The main things I wanted was enough information to be able to
>> implement
>> "jump to definition". Where you select a symbol in your
>> editor and move
>> to where that variable/function/type/class was defined, in the same
>> module or another module.  It would also be useful to find out the
>> module and package a symbol comes from so that an IDE could
>> have a good
>> stab at finding some documentation.
>>
>> For that, you'd want an API for wandering through the useful
>> information
>> in .hi files. An API corresponding to hugs/ghci's :info
>> <name>, :browse
>> <modname>, :type <name> would be a good start. You'd want to
>> be able to
>> specify which root module to load up the symbols for, optionally
>> specifing a search path and expect it to also load up the .hi
>> files for
>> any imported modules.
>
> This is all stuff that we need for Visual Studio too.  VS will 
> typecheck
> your program as you type, so you'll get errors underlined in the source
> code.  A side effect of this is that it will collect all the 
> information
> reuqired to implement "jump to definition" and "tell me the type of 
> this
> identifier" in the editor.
>
> My plan is to have an API where you can request a :load of a module
> source (perhaps omitting the code generation steps for speed) and then
> request information about the module, by source location (GHC now has
> completely accurate source location information in its abstract
> datatype; we did this recently in order to support the Visual Studio
> work).  The API will most likely be a derivative of the existing
> compilation manager interface: see 
> ghc/compiler/compMan/CompManager.lhs.
>
> Cheers,
> 	Simon
> _______________________________________________
> Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list
> Glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
>