Use of cpp

[Sven Panne]

Isaac Jones wrote:
> Ross Paterson <ross at soi.city.ac.uk> writes:
>>The initial version of the infrastructure may not support cpp, but it
>>should appear later.
> 
> FWIW, I think it'll be one of the first things we do after the 0.1
> release.  Should be very easy with hscpp.

I would be very happy if 0.1 included (hs)cpp support, otherwise the infrastructure
would be useless for me. :-( My OpenGL/GLUT binding depends heavily on preprocessing
being available, for three reasons:

    * I need a mapping from some C types to the corresponding Haskell types, which is
      figured out by autoconf/configure for the target platform in question. Alas,
      Foreign.C.Types doesn't cover every C API in the world...

    * The calling convention for WinDoze DLLs differs when compared to the convention
      used for the same library on (any?) other platform. (great idea, Bill! :-}. This
      has to be mirrored in the FFI declarations. Duplicating hundreds of essentially
      the same declarations is not really an option.

    * Sometimes a preprocessor is quite handy for syntactic abstractions, e.g. a single
      OpenGL extension gives rise to 3 Haskell declarations, including one `foreign
      import "wrapper"'. Not using an abstraction here would replicate the knowledge
      how extensions are handled into dozens of modules => extremely bad. One tricky
      macro is a small price to pay to avoid redundancy and improve modularity.

Cheers,
    S.