[Haskell-cafe] Cabal, GHC and Preprocessors

[Ashley Yakeley]

I want identifier concatenation in Haskell. For instance:

   #define CDecl(n) = class C_##n a where { f_##n :: a };

   CDecl(1)
   CDecl(2)
   CDecl(3)

(Actual motivator involves generating by type kind.)

I have no trouble switching on CPP, but this doesn't work.

The trouble is, GHC uses gcc for preprocessing, and it passes 
"-traditional" which switches this off. There doesn't seem to be a flag 
to override this.

I've tried replacing the GHC preprocessor with cpphs using -pgmP, but 
GHC passes include files using "-include", while cpphs only accepts 
"--include".

I've tried telling Cabal to use cpphs, but even if you rename the source 
file to .cpphs, it will still use GHC's gcc preprocessor rather than 
cpphs. In any case, it's not clear how to tell Cabal to pass --hashes to 
cpphs.

I've tried using Template Haskell instead, but you can't easily splice 
identifiers, only expressions, types and top-level declarations.

-- 
Ashley Yakeley