Haskell Communities Survey - Second Call for Contributions

[Bernard James POPE]

Hi all,

I'm sending this to the whole list because maybe there are others who are
doing the same thing as me, and so it would be useful to share some
effort.

>   What about a standard AST format?  What about static analysis and
>   type checking/inference? 

A few of us at Melbourne have been slowly creating a front end to
Mark Jones' Typing Haskell in Haskell. It is getting close to being useable.
It is intended as a stand-alone type inference/checking tool that can give 
detailed information about static aspects of the program. It will understand 
modules.

Given Mark's approval I would like to make it available to the Haskell
community. I think seperating this element of the language from the
compilers is a useful thing to do, especially for program transformations
that need types. It uses the Hsparser library for parsing. 
As for a standard AST and interface, that would be lovely but I think it is as 
much a language issue as a library issue.

I think there was some people working on making the front end of GHC 
more independent from the rest of the compiler. I'm not sure if this is still
happening. 

Regards,
Bernie.