WinHugs for GHCi, prompt feature

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi,

> i greatly support this project and method of its implementation. i
> will be a first user of your program :)  i hope that that it will support
> uniform way to debug programs with all 3 compilers

Thanks, thats very encouraging and nice to hear!


> to be exact, i think that it will be even more greater to develop this
> program using Haskell itself and make it OS-independent. in this way,
> more haskellers may participate in this project and more haskellers
> can use the resulting graphical environment

Indeed it would, but I fear that in opting for a cross platform
toolkit like Gtk2Hs it will be impossible to add the final layer of
polish and system integration that will change this from being useful
to being a killer application. For example, linking with Gtk2Hs and
GHC makes the binary 8Mb for hello world - the entire program so far
is under 100Kb so that puts it in a whole different ballpark. Also
things like drag and drop of files under Gtk2Hs don't work, and the
toolbar would not be native, and therefore less pretty :)

Of course, I am attempting to keep the cross platform bits and the
user interaction bits separate, so hopefully it will be possible to
have native ports of the system, but thats a way off yet. Someone has
expressed interest in porting it to Mac.

One of my friends, Mike Dodd's, is attempting to do a similar project
but using Gtk2Hs - the details of which can be found at
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yhc/Yhe . This is already cross
platform (Win, Mac, Linux) and written in Haskell.

Thanks

Neil