[Haskell-cafe] What features should an (fictitious) IDE for Haskell have?

[Ben Franksen]

Am 01.12.20 um 03:06 schrieb Mig Mit:
> Please DO store code as ascii text. At the very least that would
> allow the use of external tools — sed, diff, git, whatever. Non-ascii
> representations were tried multiple times, and largely failed, in
> particular because of terrible interaction with other tools.
> 
> Also, please make sure your IDE is a good text editor. Because that's
> what the code is — not AST, but text. Until it is finished (to a
> certain lax definition of "finished") it is likely to not even be
> representable in AST form.

Absolutely. And "a good text editor" for me includes (a) an easy way to
re-configure key bindings and (b) the ability to define macros (using
some sort of embedded language). The point is that I want to be able to
re-use my finger's muscle memory as far as possible.

That's just the basics, of course, and on top of that I would expect at
least the ability to easily navigate to the definition of a variable and
also to iteratively visit all places where it is used, centering the
code in the editor window and highlighting the variable, such that I can
navigate to the next/previous occurrence, skip the whole file or
subdirectory, etc. Like a multi-file/multi-dir language aware search and
replace.

A very cool feature would be if I could select a program phrase and let
it find /similar/ phrases, where a similarity metric could be
edit-distance with respect to language tokens (ideally ignoring
redundant parentheses and stuff like that).

Cheers
Ben