PROPOSAL: Literate haskell and module file names

[Merijn Verstraaten]

I agree that this could collide, see my beginning remark that I believe that the report should provide a minimal specification how to map modules to filenames and vice versa.

Anyhoo, I'm not married to this specific suggestion. Carter suggested "Foo+rst.lhs" on IRC, other options would be "Foo.rst+lhs" or "Foo.lhs+rst", I don't particularly care what as long as we pick something. Patching tools to support whatever solution we pick should be trivial.

Cheers,
Merijn

On Mar 16, 2014, at 16:41 , Edward Kmett wrote:
> One problem with Foo.*.hs or even Foo.md.hs mapping to the module name Foo is that as I recall JHC will look for Data.Vector in Data.Vector.hs as well as Data/Vector.hs
> 
> This means that on a case insensitive file system Foo.MD.hs matches both conventions.
> 
> Do I want to block an change to GHC because of an incompatible change in another compiler? Not sure, but I at least want to raise the issue so it can be discussed.
> 
> Another small issue is that this means you need to actually scan the directory rather than look for particular file names, but off my head really I don't expect directories to be full enough for that to be a performance problem.
> 
> -Edward
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 8:56 AM, Merijn Verstraaten <merijn at inconsistent.nl> wrote:
> Ola!
> 
> I didn't know what the most appropriate venue for this proposal was so I crossposted to haskell-prime and glasgow-haskell-users, if this isn't the right venue I welcome advice where to take this proposal.
> 
> Currently the report does not specify the mapping between filenames and module names (this is an issue in itself, it essentially makes writing haskell code that's interoperable between compilers impossible, as you can't know what directory layout each compiler expects). I believe that a minimal specification *should* go into the report (hence, haskell-prime). However, this is a separate issue from this proposal, so please start a new thread rather than sidetracking this one :)
> 
> The report only mentions that "by convention" .hs extensions imply normal haskell and .lhs literate haskell (Section 10.4). In the absence of guidance from the report GHC's convention of mapping module Foo.Bar.Baz to Foo/Bar/Baz.hs or Foo/Bar/Baz.lhs seems the only sort of standard that exists. In general this standard is nice enough, but the mapping of literate haskell is a bit inconvenient, it leaves it completelyl ambiguous what the non-haskell content of said file is, which is annoying for tool authors.
> 
> Pandoc has adopted the policy of checking for further file extensions for literate haskell source, e.g. Foo.rst.lhs and Foo.md.lhs. Here .rst.lhs gets interpreted as being reStructured Text with literate haskell and .md.lhs is Markdown with literate haskell. Unfortunately GHC currently maps filenames like this to the module names Foo.rst and Foo.md, breaking anything that wants to import the module Foo.
> 
> I would like to propose allowing an optional extra extension in the pandoc style for literate haskell files, mapping Foo.rst.lhs to module name Foo. This is a backwards compatible change as there is no way for Foo.rst.lhs to be a valid module in the current GHC convention. Foo.rst.lhs would map to module name "Foo.rst" but module name "Foo.rst" maps to filename "Foo/rst.hs" which is not a valid haskell module anyway as the rst is lowercase and module names have to start with an uppercase letter.
> 
> Pros:
>  - Tool authors can more easily determine non-haskell content of literate haskell files
>  - Currently valid module names will not break
>  - Report doesn't specify behaviour, so GHC can do whatever it likes
> 
> Cons:
>  - Someone has to implement it
>  - ??
> 
> Discussion: 4 weeks
> 
> Cheers,
> Merijn
> 
> 
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