[Haskell-cafe] Syntax extension - adding import support to let/where bindings

[Oliver Charles]

Hi all,

I'm sure this has come up before, but a quick bit of Googling didn't reveal
any prior discussions (if you known any, let me know), so I'm kicking off a
new discussion.

I find myself wanting to be able to say something like:

foo = ...
  where import Something.Specific

The result would be to import the contents of Something.Specific into the
scope of foo and its other where bindings, but not import into the rest of
the module that foo is defined in. As a motivating example, I'm currently
working on building some HTML in Haskell, and the amount of symbols that
come into scope is huge, when you have a DSL for both CSS and HTML - the
real pain point being that you get symbols that often conflict.

Here's an example of something that doesn't type-check currently

image =
  img [ width 50, style [ width (px 50) ] ]

width here is both a symbol in the HTML DSL and the CSS DSL, but to get
this to type check I need to write something like

image =
  img [ HTML.width 50, style [ CSS.width (CSS.px 50) ] ]

That's not particularly bad here, the really pain is repeatedly having to
do this for every single symbol I'm using. I'd prefer to be able to write

image =
  let css = let import CSS in [ width (px 50) ]
  in let import HTML in img [ width 50, style css ]

This is a little bit of a contrived rewrite, but hopefully it shows you
what I'd like to be able to do. Please don't fixate too much on this
example, it's only intended to illustrate the idea. When defining a large
amount of inline styles I think this pays off - I import once to bring all
the symbols I need into scope, rather than having to qualify every symbol.

In reality, it will lead to me writing code like:

myDocument = html
  where html =
          div [ style containerStyle ]
              [ div [ style rowStyle ] "Hello"
              , div [ style rowStyle ] "World!" ]
          where import HTML
        containerStyle =
          [ backgroundColor ..., padding ..., margin ... ]
          where import CSS
        rowStyle =
          [ backgroundColor ..., padding ..., margin ... ]
          where import CSS

At present the suggestion is a syntax error, so I'm hoping that part won't
be too controversial.

Thoughts?
*ocharles*
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