[Haskell-cafe] ANN: haskell-src-exts-1.1.4

[Niklas Broberg]

Fellow Haskelleers,

I'm pleased to announce the release of haskell-src-exts-1.1.4!

* On hackage: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/haskell-src-exts
* Via cabal: cabal install haskell-src-exts
* Via darcs: darcs get http://code.haskell.org/haskell-src-exts

* Report bugs: http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-src-exts

haskell-src-exts is a package for Haskell source code manipulation. In
particular it defines an abstract syntax tree representation, and a
parser and pretty-printer to convert between this representation and
String. It handles (almost) all syntactic extensions to the Haskell 98
standard implemented by GHC, and the parsing can be parametrised on
what extensions to recognise.

haskell-src-exts-1.1.4 follows version 1.1.3 in being a mostly
experimental release. From a PVP perspective, the version number
indicates that no incompatible changes have been made to the *stable*
portion of the package, i.e. anything that doesn't contain Annotated
in its module name. The experimental stuff in
Language.Haskell.Annotated{.*} has changed quite a lot, but those of
you who depend on it already must obviously know what you're doing.
;-)

haskell-src-exts-1.1.4:
===================

* For the stable part, the only new thing in haskell-src-exts-1.1.4 is
a bug fix that allows declaration headers surrounded by parentheses to
be parsed, e.g. "data (a :< b) = ...".

* For the experimental part, the new and cool feature is a full
exact-printer, allowing full round-tripping of parsing plus printing.
In other words, using the parser and the exact-printer in conjunction
gives the same result back: exactPrint . parse == id . (Well, that's
half a lie since you need to use parseWithComments and some uncurrying
if you want to so easily compose, but that's the gist of it anyway.
:-))

* There have also been a number of further changes to the (annotated)
AST to allow it to retain enough source information to allow for said
exact-printing. In particular there have been changes to the way
contexts and declaration heads are treated, and literals have been
embellished to remember just how they were given (e.g. did we use 0xFF
or 255? \BEL or \a?).

* With a few small caveats, the round-tripping works over the full
(alas somewhat small) test suite that comes with (the darcs version
of) haskell-src-exts:
  - Trailing whitespace on a line is not retained. (The test suite
uses reverse . dropWhile (isSpace) . reverse on each line to disregard
that issue.)
  - Tab characters in the source are converted to (8) spaces (except
when they appear inside comments or literals). (The test suite doesn't
contain tabs.)
  - Exact specification of literals is only remembered for literals
used as literals :-). What I mean is, source literals appearing in
other positions in the source than as Haskell literals will be
converted to a basic form. E.g. 'infixl 0x02 %%' will become 'infixl 2
%%'. Apart from infix declarations (tell me you never considered
writing them that way!) this mostly matters for various pragmas.
  - Parentheses used around the function symbol in a function
declaration will not be remembered (I can't figure out how to make a
non-outrageous change to the AST to cope with them). E.g. '(foo a) b =
...' will be printed as 'foo a b = ...'. If anyone has an idea for a
neat (or at least non-outrageous) AST fix that could handle these
cases, drop me a line.
  - Literate source files are not handled by the exact-printer (can't
re-literate them).

Please, help me test this on your source code! If you grab a darcs
version of the package from the repository, you can put any and all
source files you want to test in the "haskell-src-exts/Test/examples"
directory and then just run 'cabal test'. Please report any failing
cases to my trac! :-)

Cheers and Happy Haskelling,

/Niklas