[Haskell-cafe] Wishful thinking: a text editor that expands
function applications into function definitions
Derek Elkins
derek.a.elkins at gmail.com
Thu Apr 2 20:18:55 EDT 2009
On Thu, 2009-04-02 at 18:01 -0600, Duane Johnson wrote:
> So I was thinking about a "killer feature" for a text editor.
> Wouldn't it be neat if you could expand function calls into their
> definitions, in-place?
>
> For example, suppose we have "minus" defined like so, somewhere in
> another file:
>
> > minus (a, b, c) (x, y, z) = (a - x, b - y, c - z)
>
> Later, we make use of the function in our current context:
>
> > let p1 = (1, 2, 3)
> > p2 = (4, 5, 6)
> > in p1 `minus` p2
>
> By telling the editor to "expand" the minus, we get a temporary
> replacing of the above with:
>
> > (1 - 4, 2 - 5, 3 - 6)
>
> Another example:
>
> > parse s = map readLine ls
>
> And supposing that readLine is defined somewhere else, moving the
> cursor to readLine in the line above and "expanding" becomes:
>
> > parse s = map (\line -> words $ dropWhile (== ' ') line)
>
> This is all pretty standard for the kinds of things we do in Haskell
> to work it out by hand, but is there any reason the parser couldn't do
> this? I think it would be even harder to do automatically in any
> other language. Maybe it's already been attempted or done?
See HaRe http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/refactor-fp/hare.html
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