[Haskell-cafe] Re: How outdated is Hugs?

[Benjamin L.Russell]

On Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:41:49 -0600, John Goerzen
<jgoerzen at complete.org> wrote:

>On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 09:18:55PM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
>[...]
>
>But it takes a
>community to make support viable; if the common libraries that
>everyone uses don't work on Hugs, then people won't use it.
>
>[...]
>
>Just to close -- I will point out that ghci doesn't work on many
>platforms that Hugs does (though ghc does).  Hugs is the only
>interpreter on some of these platforms.

One other minor advantage of WinHugs, in particular, over GHCi for
Windows (and Mac OS X, since there is an OS X port available on
Darwinports at http://hugs98.darwinports.com/) users is the interface:
WinHugs provides a GUI interface, complete with mouse-activated
buttons and menus, while GHCi essentially provides a command prompt.

Although a GUI interface makes little difference to most UNIX/Linux
users, for some Haskell beginners in the Windows/OS X world, the
availability of a GUI interface could make the experience more
appealing, especially at first.

Given that some other functional programming languages provide a GUI
interface for Windows/OS X users (PLT Scheme, Erlang, and O'Caml come
to mind), if Hugs is likely to continue to have compatibility problems
with GHC, then is there any way an interface similar to that already
available for WinHugs could be created for GHCi?

If that gets underway, one additional improvement could be to improve
the REPL at handling declared functions in the REPL itself, as opposed
to in a separate file; relating to this issue, see the following blog
entry:

Haskell vs. OCaml--which do you prefer? - O'Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog
http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2006/03/haskell_vs_ocamlwhich_do_you_p.html

In this blog entry, Christopher Roach in Opinion writes as follows
(see the end of the third paragraph):

>I also hate that I can’t declare a function in Hugs or GHC’s interactive shell without doing some really kludgy tricks.

There was also one other blog entry somewhere (I can't seem to find
the entry right now) where one user mentioned that while he preferred
Haskell's syntax, he preferred O'Caml's REPL, because it allowed
declaring functions in the REPL itself more easily, so this seems to
be a common criticism with the GHCi REPL.

-- Benjamin L. Russell
-- 
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