Re: "Talking" with the compiler

[Hans Nikolaus Beck]

Hi,

I agree.  It would be nice to have also a Iterator interface for the 
AST, i.e. for jump to next/previous symbol of a special kind. Also 
information about the caller of a symbol would be nice (I don't know if 
that is already part of the compiler manager interface).

I'm interested in code visualization and refactoring, so this all would 
be nice to have :-))

BTW:  My host system will be Squeak ...

greetings

Hans

Am 20.01.2004 um 11:32 schrieb Simon Marlow:


On Mon, 2004-01-19 at 11:34, Simon Marlow wrote:
For the Visual Studio plugin we're going to need to talk to
GHCi.  We
plan to do this by designing an appropriate API for GHCi
and calling it
directly; you *could* do it by talking over a pipe, but
it's going to be
a lot of work (and slow).  If you want to do this, please talk to us
about what API you'd like to see, and we can hopefully implement
something that will be generally useful.
I wanted something like that for a Haskell IDE I was working on (not
much progress on it at the moment, but I may pick it up again).
The main things I wanted was enough information to be able to
implement
"jump to definition". Where you select a symbol in your
editor and move
to where that variable/function/type/class was defined, in the same
module or another module.  It would also be useful to find out the
module and package a symbol comes from so that an IDE could
have a good
stab at finding some documentation.
For that, you'd want an API for wandering through the useful
information
in .hi files. An API corresponding to hugs/ghci's :info
<name>, :browse
<modname>, :type <name> would be a good start. You'd want to
be able to
specify which root module to load up the symbols for, optionally
specifing a search path and expect it to also load up the .hi
files for
any imported modules.
This is all stuff that we need for Visual Studio too.  VS will 
typecheck
your program as you type, so you'll get errors underlined in the source
code.  A side effect of this is that it will collect all the 
information
reuqired to implement "jump to definition" and "tell me the type of 
this
identifier" in the editor.

My plan is to have an API where you can request a :load of a module
source (perhaps omitting the code generation steps for speed) and then
request information about the module, by source location (GHC now has
completely accurate source location information in its abstract
datatype; we did this recently in order to support the Visual Studio
work).  The API will most likely be a derivative of the existing
compilation manager interface: see 
ghc/compiler/compMan/CompManager.lhs.

Cheers,
        Simon
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