Ben Millwood wrote: > So essentially, all you are asking for is an official implementation > of haskell parsing, so that you input a program and it spits out > either "valid" or "not valid", according to the parts of the spec that > it audits.
Yes, that is the most essential requirement. It is a desirable feature for it to work as a parser, too. It can then be used as the basis for further verification tools, and for parsing with guarantees about standards compliance. And haskell-exts does work as a parser, though it perhaps not as polished as some other parsers. If we can get a parser based on haskell-src-exts instead, that would be great. But it's more work. haskell-exts is basically ready today. > ...compliance to a reference implementation... > tends to be more painful as a process. If there are bugs in the > reference implementation, other implementations then have to decide > whether to "implement" them or do what they think is best. If there > are disagreements between the reference implementation and language > spec, or ambiguities in language spec, the spec should certainly be > fixed! ...So I'm not convinced that converting part > of the language description into a machine-readable form is > necessarily for the best. I am not suggesting converting part of the spec into code and dispensing with that part of the document. I am suggesting that both the human-readable document and the reference parser should be officially part of the spec. If there is inconsistency between them, that is a bug in the spec which needs to be fixed like any other. > ...fixity resolution is one of the trickiest parts of Haskell > parsing, imo. It seems like an awful cop-out to put the really > difficult cases - like parsing \x -> x == x == 0 - out of the scope of > your verification tool. Yes, it should be in scope if possible. If the fixity handling of haskell-src-exts is deemed sufficient and we move to that now or in the future, we'll have it. > ...it seems a bit odd to > have a complete parsing library that nevertheless doesn't provide AST > inspection and manipulation, which is what I guess most people use a > haskell parser in Haskell for. haskell-src does provide that. It works and it is usable. Again, if we can be based on haskell-src-exts now or in the future, all the better. Regards, Yitz _______________________________________________ Haskell-prime mailing list Haskell-prime@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime
