On Wed, 15 Jul 1998, Alastair Reid wrote:
> > My understanding from Alastair was that Hugs was being synchronized with
> > GHC so that it could using precompiled GHC libs. Wouldn't that require
> > that it support these features as well?
>
> The doubt was about when Hugs would do another release
> or maybe about when we'd do a release of the merged system.
Ok. So what is the Hugs schedule?
> > (I has also assumed that a perl-like "eval" function would then
> > become part of GHC/Hugs -- but that may have been unwarranted)
>
> We have no specific plans to add something like that - though
> it'd obviously be nice. (There's a lot of things on the list
> of things we'd like to do but have no time for at the moment.)
I understand. Actually the ratio of externally visible tasks to manpower
makes me a little nervous.
> Module signatures is just being able to write:
>
> module Foo
> ( foo :: Int -> Int
> , bar :: Float -> Float
> , data Foo = MkFoo Int Float
> ) where
> ...
Ok. Then I'd still like to campaign for a more scalable module system.
> > * mutual recursive imports
>
> Haskell has these, Hugs doesn't.
Until when?
> > * import-chasing as part of the spec
>
> This is an environment feature not a language feature.
>
> What does it mean for GHC?
Well Java compiles, but nevertheless does import chasing.
It uses the classpath to hunt down the compiled classes to which it should
link.
> Are you wanting to do away with Makefiles?
> Makefiles can do an awful lot more than import chasing can
> and GNU makefiles are very, very short in the normal case.
Both Java and Eiffel attempt to do away with Makefiles.
Java does import chasing (see above). I prefer Eiffel's approach.
Eiffel allows you to define an Assembly of Classes in Eiffel in which
you explicitly specify where to find all the classes used in a particular
cluster -- making it easier to do version control of executables (see
http://eiffel.com/doc/manuals/language/intro/system.maker.html).
-Alex-
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S. Alexander Jacobson i2x Media
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