[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] ANNOUNCE: GHC survey results

[John Goerzen]

On 2005-06-30, Malcolm Wallace <Malcolm.Wallace at cs.york.ac.uk> wrote:
> The ideal front-end for a syntax-directed tool like Hat consists solely
> of a lexer/parser to an abstract syntax tree, with no desugaring
> whatsoever, and no typechecking.  This is essentially what we have

This sounds suspiciously like camlp4 in the ocaml world:

  http://pauillac.inria.fr/caml/camlp4/

camlp4 is, for an ocaml tool, a very nice program.  I wish extending
Haskell syntax could be as easy as extending OCaml syntax is.

camlp4 has a separate frontend/backend system.  Standard frontends
include a full standard OCaml parser and a "new syntax" OCaml parser.
The OCaml distribution also includes a Scheme frontend.  Backends
include a binary AST representation and pretty-printed OCaml syntax.

camlp4 can be integrated into the compilation (ocamlc) phase, and is
very slick in many ways.

Learning curve is not one of them.

-- John