Haskell Platform Proposal: HLint

[Duncan Coutts]

On Tue, 2010-11-16 at 10:44 +0200, Yitzchak Gale wrote:
> I wrote:
> >>> It may be true that haskell-src-exts is more commonly used
> >>> and is more appropriate for inclusion in the platform.
> >>> If so, perhaps some renaming is in order. But please, not at the
> >>> expense of total elimination of the important haskell-src
> >>> package from hackage.
> 
> Ian Lynagh wrote:
> >> In that case we presumably should have
> >>     haskell98-src   (== what is now haskell-src?)
> >>     haskell2010-src (doesn't currently exist?)
> >>     haskell-src     (== haskell-src-exts)
> 
> Yes, that would work.
> 
> Nicolas Pouillard wrote:
> > This could be different modules of the same package as well. For instance
> > one might want to convert from an Haskell 98 source into an Haskell 2010 one,
> > or an Haskell "With Extensions" one.
> 
> That would perhaps be better, but I think it would be more
> work in two ways: first It would be necessary to unite
> the packages and resolve some name-clashing issues.
> Then we would be left with a larger more monolithic package
> that would be harder to maintain.
> 
> But if you, or others, together with the current package
> maintainers, decide to go this route, I think it would
> be fine.

There's two issues here I think, one is the language in question (basic
H98/2010 or H+exts) and the other is the general infrastructure.

As I understand it, the current haskell-src-exts has many advantages
over haskell-src even if you're just using H98. For example, last time I
looked, haskell-src could not round-trip code because it forgets all
brackets in infix expressions.

So if we can have a single package with the sensible infrastructure and
within that package have two ASTs, one for "simple" Haskell and one for
"extended" Haskell then that seems like an ideal combination to me.

Duncan