[Haskell-cafe] Generating Code

[Antoine Latter]

On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 1:45 PM, L Corbijn <aspergesoepje at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> In an attempt to reduce the amount of boring repetitive work to update
> the OpenGLRaw package I've created a generator to do it partially for
> me. It currently uses haskell-src-exts for representing the haskell
> source of the modules. Though haskell-src-exts does an excellent job
> for representing haskell source, it seems to be more aimed at parsing
> haskell source and doing something with it, rather than generating it.
> For cpp macros, say for the use of different calling conventions used,
> can't be used directly, nor is there a really good way to use comments
> (at least so it seems to me).
>
> So I'm interested if there are other libraries that are more suitable
> to the task of generating haskell code for library use, and thus
> generate 'human readable' exported code (so no TH). I'm also
> interested in how other projects generate code for their packages.
>

I've used 'haskell-src' to generate code, but thankfully I didn't need
to include any CPP.

I've wanted to experiment with using haskell-src-exts to generate code
with Haddocks, but it looks like it will be painful, since it doesn't
include comments in the syntax tree proper. This is appropriate for
arbitrary comments, but Haddocks can only appear in specific locations
(I think?).

Here is a utility module I use as a wrapper around haskell-src to make
it a bit friendlier for generating modules:

http://code.haskell.org/~aslatter/code/xhb/build-utils/src/HaskellCombinators.hs

Maybe you can add an 'OtherCall String' calling convention to haskell-src-exts?

I'm not sure what to do about comments.

Antoine