Default name of target executable

[Simon Marlow]

On 10 October 2005 14:12, Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:

> Am Montag, 10. Oktober 2005 11:55 schrieb Niklas Broberg:
>> [...]
> 
>> Using a shell script is a possible work-around, but certainly not
>> *the* solution. If there is no real reason for ghc to spit out a.out
>> files, then surely choosing the exe name from the main input file
>> would simplify a programmer's life. And for applications that
>> desperately want a.out, well, there's still the -o flag, right?
> 
> Maybe the makers of GHC wanted GHC to be "GCC compatible".

There's no really deep reason for this choice, other than it being what
GHC does normally - i.e. the default binary has always been a.out
(main.exe on Windows) unless -o is given.

I don't see enough of a compelling reason to change it, sorry.  It's not
broken, just slightly inconvenient.

Cheers,
	Simon