[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANN: haskell-src-exts 0.3.2

[C.M.Brown]

> I believe that the limitation is that they use Programatica's parser
> to get an AST to run their refactorings on.  I think they've looked
> several times at using ghc's apis to do this, but hit various
> problems.  I think that the main problem is that no other parser
> preserves things like code layout and commenting, which is of course
> pretty critical to refactoring programs in a sane kind of way.

I think the main issue was that we looked at the port too early. I believe
GHC would offer everything in terms of position information
but at the time of the port there were issues such as
Strafunski traversing over GHC's AST (now made possible with derivable
instances); together with time restraints and the learning curve of GHC's
internals.

There is a technical report available that details some of the work:
(Porting HaRe to the GHC API)

http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2005/2266/

Thanks,
Chris.


>
> Thanks
>
> Tom
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>