[Haskell-cafe] Fixity parsing, Template Haskell

[Reiner Pope]

It seems to me that fixity information behaves more like semantics
than like syntax. For instance, fixities may be imported, and obey
namespacing rules. Knowing and correctly handling these rules seems
beyond the scope of a mere parser: I would hope that a single Haskell
file could be parsed without reference to any files, and fixity
declarations seem to be just about the only thing which prevent this
-- hence my suggestion to change the AST in order to regain this
property.

The use I envision of it is as I described: writing a quasiquoter
using HSE to parse the user's Haskell expressions. The problem is
that, for such a case, HSE (or any other parser) is forced to parse
infix expressions for which it cannot possibly know the correct
fixities. Any result with more information than the list form I gave
would be a lie.

I realise that I don't know how fixities are implemented in Haskell
compilers, so perhaps I'm misunderstanding how they are treated.

Cheers,

Reiner

On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 11:54 PM, Niklas Broberg
<niklas.broberg at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Of course, this would require a change to Template Haskell, so a
>> second-best solution would be to forbid unparenthesised expressions in
>> my quasiquoter. Then, parsing can proceed correctly without knowing
>> the fixities. This would be easiest to do if haskell-src-exts changed
>> its AST in a similar way to described above for Template Haskell.
>
> I'm not sure I follow you here. In what way would it be simpler if HSE
> changes its AST to a less-information constructor? I won't do that,
> for the same reason you point out with TH and disadvantages when using
> it as a library, though I'm still curious what uses you envision and
> how it would be made easier. I'm still in the process of designing the
> fixity support for HSE, and all input is valuable. :-)
>
> Cheers,
>
> /Niklas
>