[Haskell-cafe] Software Tools in Haskell

[Tommy McGuire]

In the "if anyone is interested,..." department....

For reasons that remain unclear, early this fall I started translating 
Brian W. Kernighan and P.J. Plaugher's classic _Software Tools in 
Pascal_ into Haskell.  I have completed most of it, up to the second 
part of chapter 8 which presents a proto-m4 preprocessor.  I have the 
code online including notes, comments, descriptions, and a few alternate 
approaches.

Attractions include:

* A fair gamut of the usual Unix suspects: proto-cat, proto-wc, 
proto-tr, proto-compress, proto-ar, proto-grep, etc.

* A usable editor, if you consider a de-featured ed-alike to be usable.

* A simple monadic regular expression engine.

* Zippers, Parsec, the State monad, the StateT monad transformer, and 
other attempts to sully Computing Science's brightest jewels.

* Lots and lots of really bad Haskell, including a fair bit that is a 
direct translation of 30-year old Pascal (see xindex in translit, Ch. 2, 
if you need to skip lunch).  Programming really has advanced, you know.

Anyway, the URL is:
   http://www.crsr.net/Programming_Languages/SoftwareTools

Questions and comments would be appreciated, especially suggestions for 
how to make the code cleaner and more understandable.  Flames and 
mockery are welcome, too, but only if they're funny---remember, I've 
been staring at Haskell, Pascal (plus my job-related Perl, CORBA, and 
C++) for a while; there's no telling what my mental state is like.

[I had intended to wait until I had the whole thing done to make this 
announcement, but I recently moved and have not made much forward 
progress since, other than putting what I had done online.]



-- 
Tommy M. McGuire
mcguire at crsr.net