[Haskell-cafe] Re: Editors for Haskell

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

>   - about formatted error messages (I am sure you guys
> don't care), could someone build a light GHC front end
> that given a .hs/.lhs file produces two XML files with
> specified DTD, the parsed structure and the error
> messages? the reason for choosing XML is that not only
> the Java people (including Leif Frenzel) but also
> virtually anyone can access these information (in
> order to create a great IDE) immediately and without
> loosing the structure.

This would be great, and could perhaps be used by other compilers as
well, but is likely to be a lot of work. Someone will need to go
through all possible Haskell error messages, probably assign an ID to
each one, and write something about the exact meaning of the error
message.

However, this would be really really useful for beginners to find more
information. I started trying to do this with Yhc, but got bored once
I got past 10 error messages. (See
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~malcolm/cgi-bin/darcsweb.cgi?r=yhc-devel;a=headblob;f=/src/compiler98/Error.hs
for my attempt)

Thanks

Neil