The future of Haskell discussion

[Peter Achten]

At 09:58 14-9-01 +0200, Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:

>I didn't mean that a Haskell binding to wxWindows should be made. I meant
>that the strategy of wxWindows should be used also for a Haskell GUI library.
>This strategy is to define a common GUI interface and provide implementations
>for different platforms based on different libraries like GTK+ (for GNOME),
>Qt (for KDE), Win32.

This strategy has been followed by the pilot project that has been 
described in [1]. In this project we have ported a crucial subset of the 
Clean Object I/O library to Haskell. The Clean Object I/O library is used 
for major projects such as the Clean IDE and the Clean theorem prover 
SPARKLE by Maarten de Mol.
The pilot port has been done on a Windows platform, so that we could reuse 
the primitive implementation layer. To port it to a more Unix friendly 
environment, I guess Manuel Chakravarty's GTK binding library is very well 
suited.

You can find the results from the pilot project in the GHC CVS repository at
         fptools/hslibs/object-io

The current state of affairs is due to severe lack of time a little 
unsatisfactory... To make this project manageable, it would be good to have 
some kind of automatic translator (nothing fancy, just a specialised 
translator from Clean Object I/O to Haskell Object I/O would do) that will 
derive the Haskell version from the Clean version that I do maintain. I 
haven't had time yet to make such a tool.

Regards,
Peter Achten

------------------
[1] Peter Achten and Simon Peyton Jones, "Porting the Clean Object I/O 
Library to Haskell", in Mohnen, M. and Koopman, P. (eds) Proceedings of 
12th International Workshop Implementation of Functional Languages, 
IFL2000, Aachen, Germany, September 2000, Selected Papers, Springer, LNCS 
2011, pp. 194-213.

ftp://ftp.cs.kun.nl/pub/Clean/papers/2001/achp2001-HaskellObjectIO.ps.gz
ftp://ftp.cs.kun.nl/pub/Clean/papers/2001/achp2001-HaskellObjectIO.pdf