[Haskell-cafe] Re: More on the random idea

[Simon Marlow]

Duncan Coutts wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 20:14 +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
> 
>>> You looked at the source to GHCi itself I presume? It uses the GHC API,
>>> so it's a good place to start with building a variant of GHCi that uses
>>> the GHC API :-)
>>>   
>> No. Actually, as per the wiki, I was looking at the source code to the 
>> GHC API. (Apparently there isn't even any Haddock docs, despite the 
>> requisit comments existing in the source...)
> 
> Yes, it'd be nice to have haddock docs for it.
> 
>> I suppose I could have looked at the source for GHCi - but again I would 
>> imagine it's littered with error checking and other user-friendliness, 
>> rather than being written to be clearly readable by beginner hackers. ;-)
> 
> I suppose that's probably right. A minimal read-eval loop as a way of
> seeing how to use the ghc api would be nice.
> 
>> (Also... presumably I'd have to download some giant tarball and work out 
>> how to open it. And then find the source code for GHCi amoungst 
>> everything else.)
> 
> It's not that scary :-)
> 
> http://darcs.haskell.org/ghc/compiler/ghci/

BTW, you want to look at InteractiveUI.hs and GhciMonad.hs.  The rest of the 
files in that directory belong to the implementation of the bytecode compiler, 
and hence are *below* the GHC API.  One day we'll reorganise the sources to make 
this clearer.

Cheers,
	Simon