patch applied (haskell-prime-status): proposal: remove string gaps

Neil Mitchell ndmitchell at gmail.com
Tue Apr 1 16:47:30 EDT 2008


Hi Henrik,

In reality, string gaps are unusable in practice, because of GHC and
-cpp. We had some in Yhc at one point, and then breakage happened, so
we removed them.

To quote from the page:

    * string gaps cause problems with CPP, which doesn't like the
backslash at the end of the line. (a minor consideration, since CPP is
not part of the language, and in any case there is cpphs).

CPP might not be part of the language, but it is used extensively in
many projects - as such it does matter that you don't get obscure
errors in one part of a file by using CPP in an entirely different
part. The cpphs argument is perfectly sensible, if the GHC -cpp
invoked cpphs, but it doesn't, and doesn't seem to be likely to.

If you have two features battling each other, you probably need to
remove one of them. CPP isn't going to be removed, which kind of
forces the issue...

Thanks

Neil


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