[Haskell-cafe] Haskell as a scripting language.

[John Goerzen]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 05:20:54PM -0400, David F. Place wrote:
> Hi, All.
> 
> I needed to make a batch of edits to some input files after a big change
> in my program.  Normally, one would choose some scripting language, but
> I can't bear to program in them.   The nasty thing about using Haskell
> is that giving regexes as string constants sometime requires two levels
> of quoting.  For instance. (mkRegex "\\\\\\\\") matches \\.

I've been tempted to write a preprocessor that would accept
Python-like strings, such as r'foo'  (raw, with no backslash
interpolation).  And while we're at it, transform things like

  "Hi there, ${name}!"

into

  "Hi there, " ++ name ++ "!"

A dumb preprocessor should not be all that hard to write, I should
think.

Oh, also the """here docs""" would also be lovely.

> To get around that, I put the regexes in the head of a literate program
> and let the program gobble itself up.  Works great!  I think I'll always
> turn to Haskell for my scripting needs now.  

Whoa, that is sneaky and clever.  But it will fail the minute you try
to run this on a compiled program, because then getProgName will give
you the binary executable.

-- John