GHCi (was Re: Mixture of Integer and Float arithmetic without "fromIntegral "?)

[Simon Marlow]

> On Fri, Dec 08, 2000 at 12:37:59AM -0800, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> > (GHCi is the revised Plan.)
> > 
> > Incidentally, GHCi is just about working.  It acts as a compiler
> > with a built-in 'make' too.  This is good, not because it 
> figures out
> > dependencies, which is easy, but because it remembers the 
> results of one
> > compilation for the next.  This about doubles the speed of 
> compilation
> > for large systems.  Mixed interpreted/compiled code is on the way.
> 
> Will it be easy to add support for preprocessors?
> 
> Classic Hugs has a flag -F for specifying a preprocessor for 
> all source
> files, and I've hacked an option to redefine the set of source file
> suffixes.  Then the preprocessor can be written to do different things
> depending on the suffix.  Is this sort of thing compatible with GHCi?

In principle, yes.  But there are several stages to GHC's compilation
cycle; where exactly the user-specified preprocessing stage would fit in
is something we'd need to discuss.

Cheers,
	Simon