I agree with Neil. Translators are very difficult to do right, except for the most trivial transformations. Changing tabs to spaces is about as far as I would trust an automatic translator.
-- Lennart On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 9:21 AM, Neil Mitchell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi > > I think Henrik's criteria are pretty close to perfect. > > > As I have argued before on the committee list, I also think we should > *not* > > worry about backwards incompatible changes too much in cases where a > simple > > automatic translation from H98 to H' code is possible. Even for a large > > project, it is IMHO no big hardship to run a H98->H' translator over all > > Haskell sources. > > Some questions: > > 1) Will I (the programmer) have to mode switch in painful ways between > H98 and H'? Do I have to learn a pile of exceptions, or is there some > common rule that works? (i.e. removing n+k is fine since I just don't > learn it, changing the fixity of $ is not since I need to know both) > > 2) Will tool T (the translator) work on academic papers that have > previously been published. > > 3) Will tool T handle all of GHC's extensions. > > 4) Will tool T deal with things like CPP, hsc, trhsx, happy, alex > etc... - all these file formats which include embedded Haskell. > > 5) Will tool T ever exist. > > I think the answer to 2-5 is nearly certainly going to be "No". I > don't think the relevance of a conversion tool should even be > considered until some person steps forward and says without doubt that > _they_ will write the converter. Even if they did there very best, it > still won't be trivial to use in all cases. > > > As John Launchbury has said, given Haskell's current rise in popularity, > anything that > > we do not fix with H' will be much harder, if not impossible, to fix in > the future. > > That is a very good point. Perhaps we're already a little too late. > > Thanks > > Neil > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-prime mailing list > Haskell-prime@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime >
_______________________________________________ Haskell-prime mailing list Haskell-prime@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime