Over the weekend I spent some time using Hugs PPC. Here are my comments. Hugs PPC runs "queens 8" about 17 times faster than MacGofer. Even better, I no longer have to convert my Hugs 1.4 scripts back to Gofer. However, Hugs PPC does have a few bugs, and is not very friendly. Bugs A couple of times I got the dreaded internal graph error thingy. I believe the problem has been identified, so I guess this will be fixed in the next release. The :r command doesn't. After editing a script, you must reload using the :l command. Haskore does not load. I tried changing the path to HaskoreLoader in the Haskore.hs script, but then the System file gave an error. Usability Hugs PPC is not very friendly. Here are some suggested improvements. Be warned, though, that the only programming I have done on a Mac are with HyperCard and MacGofer, so I really don't have a clue about the feasibility of these changes. Environment variables, particularly the search paths, should be read from a preferences file. I have my own Haskell libraries, and scripts scattered over many different folders. Every time I start Hugs I have to re-enter absolute search paths for the libraries, then :cd to the working directory. Using :cd to change the working directory is tedious. Could we have command in the File menu, with a standard open dialogue, to do this? Command-. does not seem to interrupt long IO sequences. A simple editor for recalling and editing the previous command or expression would make the system much easier to use. The :f and :e commands do not find the correct line. Is there a way to get BBEdit Lite to jump to a line? Line numbers reported by Hugs PPC don't match BBEdit Lite line numbers if the script contains long paragraphs with soft wrapping. I have no idea what you can do about this. Soft wrapping is a useful feature for literate scripts. I think I may have had trouble trying the change the path using the :s command, because the path I wanted would not fit on one line. Is is possible to enter commands and expressions longer than a line? If not, this is a problem. It would be useful if the Hugs PPC window was resizable. Peter Pudney
