[Haskell-cafe] Human-friendly compiler errors for GHC

[Gwern Branwen]

On 2008.07.13 14:36:03 +0100, Max Bolingbroke <batterseapower at hotmail.com> scribbled 2.8K characters:
...
> Well, noone has actually said they think fuzzy matching would be
> useful yet, so I suspect this patch is dead on the vine :). I've filed
> a ticket with the code anyway
> (http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2442) so at least it's
> available for others to look at.
,,,
> Cheers,
> Max

Don't be discouraged; I think it would be useful. IMO, Haskellers tend to be pretty insensitive when it comes to usability.

For example, before the GHC devs were asked for that feature, I wonder whether anyone ever thought: "Hey, when ghc -Wall complains about having no type signature - why doesn't it print out the inferred type signature? That would be helpful and convenient."

I don't think it's because there's any sort of gung-ho elitism there, it's just not something anyone but the educators like the Helium folk really think about much.

--
gwern
virginia spies ISADC in rounds GRU Alex CQB Lander Elvis
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