FW: Library infrastructure

[Isaac Jones]

Martin Sj=F6gren <md9ms@mdstud.chalmers.se> writes:

> What do you mean distutils not selecting compilers? It finds gcc on my
> linux machine and on Solaris, and I think it probes for some windows
> compilers too. I don't know about e.g. macos.

Ahh, good to hear.  A dist-utils style infrastructure is starting to
sound even better.  Plus Python provides us something that we could
model the Haskell version from.

> Not all compilers *have* an interactive mode, do they? I thought nhc98
> was just a compiler? This makes it tricky.

But hmake interactive ("hi") sorta fixes this by providing a common
interactive interface to different compilers / interpreters.

> Another problem is that when you run  'hugs File.hs' or 'ghci File.hs',
> they start interactive mode, 'python file.py' runs the program. Are
> there flags to all interpreters that run main automatically? I know
> there's runhugs for example, but what about ghc(i)? What about nhc98?

As others have said, it could be easy to wrap this behavior by
compiling and running the program, and in particular, it seems to me
that hmake (or the system that Henrik Nilsson mentioned) could provide
some kind of /usr/bin/haskell interface much as it provides its hmake
interactive interface.

Maybe a /usr/bin/haskell interface could look for a "main" function in
module Main (as runhugs does) and / or a "setup" or "main" functions
in module Setup.

Does anyone think that dist-utils is not like what we want?  Like I
said, I don't have deep experience with it.

peace,

isaac