editline vs haskeline (was: 6.10-candidate tested)

[Judah Jacobson]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 10:56 AM, Claus Reinke <claus.reinke at talk21.com> wrote:
>>> The advantage is ghci works without editline and readline. The
>>> disadvantage is if you want arrow keys and backspace to work, you should
>>> have installed http://www.thrysoee.dk/editline/ first.
>>
>> libedit on Debian is very out-dated[1]. Haskell bindings (editline)
>> doesn't compile against it (at least I could not compile it).
>
> There was also no working libedit for mingw last time I checked (shelarcy
> was working on a patch at the time - did that work out?).
>
> Would it be possible to use haskeline as a fallback/default,
> for future Ghc's?
>
> http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/haskeline

As the author of haskeline, integrating it into ghc is on my TODO
list. :-)  Note that the earliest this could happen would be
ghc-6.12.1, which won't be released for at least another year.

But just to reiterate:
1) Other than on Windows, libedit is widely available and compatible
(including Debian, which just needs the libedit-dev package).
2) The Windows console provides basic interaction even without
libedit, including arrow key left/right, history, delete key, etc.
(Tab completion of Haskell identifiers is the most glaring omission.)

-Judah