[Haskell-cafe] hacking ghci

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

I'd suggest #2.  It's exactly the reason that GHC is available as a library, and it makes your work much more independent of GHC.  If you find it doesn't have the API you need, we can work to improve it.

Simon

| -----Original Message-----
| From: haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org [mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of
| Walter Moreira
| Sent: 08 January 2007 06:21
| To: haskell-cafe at haskell.org
| Subject: [Haskell-cafe] hacking ghci
|
| Hi Haskellers. A short while ago I asked about the possibility to have
| the output of ghci in color.  Thanks to Donald Stewart who set up a
| wiki page to continue the attempt. Other people suggested HsColour and
| GUI's (thanks too). I'm not so interested in highlighting the snippets
| of code which ghci displays, but to use different colors for the
| different types of output: different colors for the prompt, input,
| warnings, exceptions, normal output, etc.
|
| Are any of these ideas viable?:
|
| 1. Hack the code of Interactive.hs in the GHC distribution and
|    substitute the calls to 'putStr[Ln]' by some thin wrapper which can
|    write with colors, according to a command line option (--color or
|    --colour, for example), maybe using HsColour. This looks easy
|    enough and I'd be willing to do it, but it's intrusive, and one has
|    to mantain a different version of ghci in parallel with the main
|    ghci.
|
| 2. Use GHC as library (from 6.6 on) and write a similar application as
|    ghci, with more emphasis in the 'interactive' part of the name (in
|    the same way as the relation between Python and the IPython
|    extended shell). This is more work and more duplicate efforts, but
|    it may be worthly, perhaps.
|
| 3. Write a wrapper which communicates with ghci via pipes. I read some
|    attempts about this somewhere, and people suggested an approach as
|    in #2.
|
| I haven't mentioned the GUI applications, since I would like to just
| have something in the spirit of ghci (command line oriented), but with
| colors or with configurable output.  Which approach do you people
| think it is best?
|
| Sorry for the long message. Cheers,
| Walter
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