[Haskell-cafe] Haskell mode for emacs - some questions

[David House]

peterv writes:
 > - How can I just compile and run in one go without having to type "ghc
 > --make main.hs" as arguments for the "compile..." command and then typing
 > "main.exe" for "shell command..."? This is what you do all the time when
 > using Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc: just hit the F5 key which builds all the
 > dependencies and runs one or more generated executables. Easy. Visual
 > Haskell does this (in the cases it does not hang for some unknown reason).
 > Of course I could dig into ELISP, but somehow I feel this must be supported
 > somehow. 

Use C-c C-l to load the file into GHCi. This is better than just compiling it:
you get an interactive environment in which to play around with, test out
functions, etc. You can still 'run' your program by typing 'main' in GHCi.

 > - There seems to be support for "Haskell Font Lock Symbols", which should
 > convert \, -> and maybe other symbols to good looking Unicode fonts. I can't
 > get the correct fonts working on Windows. Now as I understood this is not
 > really supported because of indentation problems, as underneed the single
 > Unicode arrow character is converted into ->? This is unfortunate, because
 > that's one of the things I really like about Sun's Fortress: the usage of
 > Unicode symbols makes the text look much more mathematically, versus the
 > half-century-old ASCII text. Furthermore in almost all Haskell books the
 > richer font symbols are used for clarity. Any hints on this topic?

I wouldn't be surprised if this code had bit-rotted, or if there never has been
Windows support. It's a corner function, used by few and therefore not that
polished. By all means, try it out, and if it doesn't work, feel free to submit
patches, but I doubt it'll get changed any time soon by a haskell-mode developer
:)

-- 
-David House, dmhouse at gmail.com