lexical description problem in language report?

Ross Paterson ross@soi.city.ac.uk
Thu, 2 Aug 2001 18:17:35 +0100


On Tue, Jul 24, 2001 at 10:50:16AM -0700, Thomas Hallgren wrote:
> Although qualified names are listed in section 2.4,and in appendix B, 
> the two first productions of the grammar are:
> 
>   program ->  {lexeme | whitespace }
>   lexeme  ->  varid | conid | varsym | consym | literal | special | 
> reservedop | reservedid
> 
> There is no reference to qualified names here. I thought the purpose of 
> these productions were to say that a Haskell program is correct on the 
> lexical level iff there is a derivation of it in the lexical grammar, 
> starting from the nonterminal "program".

Similarly, in 4 and 4.4.2, we have

	gendecl -> fixity [digit] ops

but digit isn't in the list of lexemes in 2.2 and B.2, nor is it
reasonable for it to be there.  I suggest

	gendecl -> fixity [integer] ops

with the value of the integer constrained to be between 0 and 9 inclusive.
Incidentally, this is what GHC, Hugs and NHC do, in that they accept

	infix 0x0003 !$%

as equivalent to

	infix 3 !$%

presumably because doing what the Report says would be rather awkward.