Jan Skibinski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote,
> If a good pre-processor is still a valid option, would not
> something similar to Camlp4 be better than the plain CPP?
>
> Camlp4 ===> http://pauillac.inria.fr/camlp4/
>
> "Camlp4 is a Pre-Processor-Pretty-Printer for Objective Caml.
> It offers syntactic tools (parsers, extensible grammars), the
> ability to extend the concrete syntax of Objective Caml
> (quotations, syntax extensions), and to redefine it from
> scratch."
>
> If such a Haskell-specific tool existed and had the
> ability to support any syntactic extensions to Haskell
> then people would not have to worry too much about
> syntactic incompatibilities, would they?
The problem is that a pre-processor adds a new level of
semantic complexity to the language - so if we can do
without it, we'll definitely make our lives simpler.
Besides, one nice property of Haskell is its relatively
(compared to other languages) precise semantic definition
(ie, the translation to the Haskell kernel). A
pre-processor wouldn't fit nicely in here, I suppose.
Manuel
