[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] ANN: ghci-haskeline 0.1

[Roman Cheplyaka]

* Andrew Hunter <ahunter at cs.hmc.edu> [2009-01-12 13:41:03-0800]
> On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 12:57:57PM -0800, Judah Jacobson wrote:
> > I'm pleased to announce the first release of ghci-haskeline.  This
> > package uses the GHC API to reimplement ghci with the Haskeline
> > library as a backend.  Haskeline is a library for line input in
> > command-line programs, similar to readline or editline, which is
> > written in Haskell and thus (hopefully) more easily integrated into
> > other Haskell programs.
> > 
> 
> Perhaps this has already been discussed at length, in which case I
> apologize but, well, why provide line input editing at all?
> 
> A number of languages/programs (off the top of my head: sml, most
> Schemes) don't; the standard method to get line editing is rlwrap.
> And this works (in my limited experience) quite well.  The
> disadvantage as I see it of using editline or Haskeline or whatever is
> that it's going to be sutbly different than other methods; presumably,
> people won't like the changes in behavior.
> 
> It seems to me that from a UNIX-y separation of concern view, the
> right thing to do (as many languages have chosen) is to /not/ provide
> line editing, and just let the user do that with any number of
> convenient tools that focus on getting/that/ right (like rlwrap.)  Is
> there a reason we've not taken that approach?

For example, ghci does more intelligent completion than rlwrap probably
can do:
X<tab> -> no matches
:m X<tab> -> XMonad

-- 
Roman I. Cheplyaka :: http://ro-che.info/
"Don't let school get in the way of your education." - Mark Twain