[Haskell-cafe] develop new Haskell shell?

[Brian Hulley]

Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
>
> Funny this should come up. We've just had several submissions to work
> on a functional shell for the google summer of code.
>
> Here's a bit of a summary of what's been done in Haskell I prepared a
> while back.
>
> http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~pls/thesis-topics/functionalshell.html

Looking at the brief description of the Esther shell, I was struck by the 
question - why not just use Haskell directly ie by extending something like 
GHCi to allow interactive definition of functions/values and an operator to 
map filenames to functions.

I was reminded of 
http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/byte_aug81/design_principles_behind_smalltalk.html 
and in particular the following principle:

     Operating System:
        An operating system is a collection of things
                                      that don't fit into a language.
        There shouldn't be one.

Regards, Brian.