Preprocessors

[Sven Panne]

Simon Marlow wrote:
> On 20 October 2004 17:03, Peter Simons wrote:
>>Sven Panne writes:
>> > If you mean "everyone happy with a LGPL", then I would
>> > agree. But GHC and Hugs use a BSD-style license, so cpphs
>> > is not an option for them.
>>Why not?
> I wouldn't go so far as to say "not an option", but we definitely prefer
> as much of the system to be BSD-licensed as possible.  It makes life
> much easier for our commercial users.  I could talk at length on the
> subject, but life's too short :-p

I can only second that. I'm currently working for a very large company, and
licensing issues are something very serious for such institutions. If there
are any doubts about licenses, a technology will simply be ignored just for
that reason. I know enough managers who will run away screaming if they hear
"(L)GPL", so staying with the *much* more industry-friendly BSD license will
be a good thing for GHC IMHO. I don't want to start a useless flame war about
licenses, I just wanted to make my motivation clear: Like it or not, the (L)GPL
is an obstacle for the introduction of new technologies in the industry, at
least this is how I experienced this issue. This has nothing to do with my
personal opinion, though...

Furthermore, I don't think that the "C" in CPP is a real problem, at least in
the traditional mode. 99% of the uses of a preprocessor for Haskell was simply
for ironing out some platform/implementation differences, nothing very elaborate.
So we don't really need a Haskell-aware preprocessor, just something which
doesn't stumble over common Haskell constructs and behaves consistently.

Cheers,
    S.