capabilities of GHC API

[Lemmih]

On 5/19/07, Frederik Eaton <frederik at a5.repetae.net> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I think what I'm trying to do is too ambitious, but I thought I would
> ask to see if it is possible. It seems like there is no easy way to do
> it, given what I've seen of the GHC API.
>
> I would like to have a function, say it is called "this", which has
> the following effect in ghci
>
> > let n = 2 in this
> > n
> 2
>
> In other words, it captures all the variables which are in scope, and
> adds them to the GHCi environment. Somebody helpful will probably say
> "But you can just write 'let n = 2'!", but that is not the aim. There
> are several aims. One is to be able to look at the variables inside a
> function which one is trying to debug, then inserting 'this' will
> cause them to be in scope, I think that would be useful. A more
> important aim is to be able to use existentially quantified variables
> easily. Currently I can do:
>
> > reifyIntegral 5 (\n -> print $ reflectNum n)
> 5
>
> but how can I get GHCi to have an 'n' binding which is inside the
> function? Clearly just returning 'n' will not work:
>
> > reifyIntegral 5 id
>
> <interactive>:1:0:
>     Inferred type is less polymorphic than expected
> ...
>
> This is what I am thinking of doing, but as I said it seems ambitious.
> There are several easier things one could think of:
>
> > let n = 2 in bind "n" n
> > n
> 2
>
> If it were possible to add bindings to the GHCi bindings list, then
> this would be easy. Is it possible? The documentation doesn't seem to
> mention such a capability.
>
> Also, probably another useful feature would be to combine 'this' with
> something in the IO monad:
>
> > withProgName "blah" thisIO
> > getProgName
> "blah"
>
> So, are these things currently possible? Planned? Have the functions I
> describe been implemented already? I think there is a GHCi debugger in
> the works, so maybe functionality like this will be part of it, I
> didn't want to start something on my own if that is the case...

This is pretty much that the GHCi debugger does expect it restores the
environment at the end of a breakpoint.

If you have GHC-6.6 or greater, try: let n = 2 in GHC.Base.breakpoint ()

-- 
Cheers,
  Lemmih