Holes in GHC

[Matthew Farkas-Dyck]

On 26/01/2012, Thijs Alkemade <thijsalkemade at gmail.com> wrote:
> Let me try to describe the goal better. The intended users are people
> new to Haskell or people working with existing code they are not
> familiar with. When starting with Haskell, at least in my experience,
> it happens lot that you have an idea about what you need to write, but
> there are some parts in the expression you're working on you don't
> know yet.
>
> This is where you would want to use a hole. Just like undefined, it
> has type `a`, so it can be used anywhere (and when compiling, we
> intend to turn it into an exception too), but the difference with
> undefined is that after the typechecking has succeeded, you get a list
> of your holes, with the type that was inferred for them, as a sort of
> todo-list.
>

Megawin. Many times, lost in a tangle of code, this was just what I
needed, and, alas, just what I lacked.

>
> Regards,
> Thijs Alkemade

Also, I think it would be nice to have a mode in which GHC would just
print the type of each hole in a module. Otherwise, one might have to
load each needed module in GHCi, which could be awkward, especially if
the holed term is in definition of others.

Cheers,
MFD