[Haskell-cafe] Re: Nano-Languages

[John D. Earle]

Vladimir, I do not mind becoming more familiar with the internals, but as 
you pointed out that Template Haskell may provided much of the needed 
functionality. I tend to doubt that it will provide all the needed 
functionality, however. The new syntax created by the syntax macros will 
either reinterpret a preexisting production in the language or will create a 
new one which may be based on a preexisting production, a variant. In the 
latter case, the compiler will have a knee jerk reaction. It will feel that 
the structure is grammatically illegal! This knee jerk would need to be 
intercepted and assigned an interpretation. We would then need to calm the 
compiler down and say its ok.

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Vladimir Zlatanov" <vlado at dikini.net>
Sent: 10 Thursday December 2009 0854
To: "Haskell Cafe" <haskell-cafe at haskell.org>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Nano-Languages

>> If one were to think of this as a project, the initial project goal might 
>> be
>> a proof of concept, that such an undertaking though non-trivial may be 
>> worth
>> while.
>
> for me it is currently quite tough, since I don't know the internals at 
> all
>
>> It would be desirable to act on the abstract syntax trees that result 
>> from
>> the compiler parsing the source code and not the source code itself.
>
> Template Haskell does that - it provides quotations, quasi-quotations
> and splicing, along with other utilities.
>
> I would guess that a simple design would be to add an import_syntax
> clause, similar to import, but importing only declarations with type
> ...-> Q ... and splicing automatically their appearances.
>
> This is a back of the envelope design, and I haven't considered any
> potential side-effects, but sounds like a reasonable approach
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