GHC's CPP and Cabal's unlit

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2007-11-29 at 13:14 +0000, Bayley, Alistair wrote:

> I think that's the real question: should Cabal's unlit be faithful to
> the H98 standard, or should it be treated simply as a Haddock
> preprocessor? (and therefore can be a little lax)
> 
> H98 does require that code and comments are properly separated by
> blank lines, where a blank line consists only of whitespace:
>   http://haskell.org/onlinereport/syntax-iso.html#sect9.4
> So what I've proposed would be a deviation from the standard.
> 
> I do need a way of ensuring that I can write paragraphs in contiguous
> comment blocks. e.g. so this
> 
> |
> para 1
>  
> para 2
> 
> becomes
> 
> -- |
> -- para 1
> 
> -- para 2
> 
> (Haddock will ignore the second paragraph).

Yes, I see. how about using {- -} brackets instead. Would that work
better?

> Or maybe I can enhance the unlit algorithm so that it can detect
> whether or not a blank line precedes a program line and behave
> accordingly.

It would be nice if we can find an unlit extension that is compatible
with the H98 requirement and alo allows useful behaviour for haddock.

Duncan