[Haskell-cafe] Playing with GHC [was Arbitrary precision?]

[Andrew Coppin]

>> Oh, by the way, thanks for the extra syntax. It's really annoying having 
>> to locate Notepad.exe on the start menu, type "import Blah", save it as 
>> "Thing.hs", open Windoze Explorer, locate Thing.hs, and then 
>> double-click it just so that I can try stuff out in GHCi...
> God that sounds painful. As well as reading about ghci [1] you might
> consider Emacs and haskell-mode for a productive environment.  
>   

I started out using Hugs. (The 2003 edition.) I used it for ages, and it 
worked pretty well.

However, later they released a new version. So I downloaded and 
installed that. On one hand, it has a cool updated GUI. On the other 
hand, it behaves very erratically. Truncates output, produces spurios 
extra output, sometimes randomly closes all by itself, and every now and 
then Dr Watson pays me a visit.

Eventually I took the plunge and spent 6 weeks downloading GHC. 
(Basically because I wanted to be able to compile stuff to make it go 
faster.) GHCi is drastically less inviting then Hugs; hell, the window 
isn't even scrollable! (Also, is there a reason why the installer 
doesn't add GHC to your searchpath?) Starting GHCi and typing an 8-mile 
long file path with no tab completion isn't fun. However, after about 2 
months, I discovered that double-clicking a Haskell file instantly loads 
it into GHCi - which is obviously much easier. It's still annoying 
having to write "import Data.List", save it, and double-click it just so 
I can (say) look up the type for sortBy. (At home I just use Hoogle, but 
at work that takes too long.)

Eventually I got used to using GHC, and used Hugs less and less due to 
its flakiness, and the fact that half the libraries in the world only 
work with GHC. (The other half don't work with any system at all.) In 
fact, the other day I decided to install Hugs completely. Special 
surprise: the uninstaller is broken. You cannot uninstall Hugs. Oh, 
thanks for that...

Anyway... long ramble over... Emacs isn't my operating system of choice. 
I prefer to use SciTE (which is *just* a text editor - as in, it doesn't 
also come with an integrated toaster and alarm clock). One SciTE window 
open, one command prompt pointing at the source folder... seems to work 
fairly well. Would be nice if SciTE would colourise Haskell syntax, but 
since Haskell is so absurdly hard to parse, I guess that's asking a lot. ;-)

PS. What the heck email client puts URLs in as footnotes?