[Haskell-cafe] IDE?

PeterV bf3 at telenet.be
Sat Jun 16 02:10:51 EDT 2007


Thank for the reply. 

I'll try the emacs approach (or better Xemacs because Emacs on Windows has
really ugly font smoothing), but I must say that - being an old school
object-oriented programmer who got spoiled by fully integrated IDEs like
Borland's TurboPascal, Microsoft Visual Studio, and Eclipse - switching to
emacs or VIM is not an easy task :) Even on the commodore 64 I used a mini
IDE for writing 6502 assembler ;)

About Apple's Shake: this is a flow-graph based image composition package.
It's like a tiny bit of functional programming (limited to images as
values), represented as a graphical acyclic graph of functional nodes. Each
of these nodes computes a result, and this result can be visualized by
clicking on a button on each node, so you can "debug" the output of any
node. An Haskell IDE could do the same for functions (it's like dynamically
adding an "unsafePerformIO print" to the selected function). And then like
Visual Studio one should be able to write "debugger visualizers"
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zayyhzts(VS.80).aspx

Peter


-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas Schilling [mailto:nominolo at googlemail.com] 
Sent: Saturday, June 16, 2007 12:47 AM
To: bf3 at telenet.be
Cc: haskell-cafe at haskell.org
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] IDE?

Yes this is kind of sad.  FWIW, here's how I currently approximate  
these features using Emacs + Haskell mode:

On 15 jun 2007, at 23.38, <bf3 at telenet.be> wrote:

> I've searched the internet for an Haskell IDE that supports the  
> following:
>
> - syntax highlighting

haskell mode

> - cross module refactoring

there is HaRe, haven't tried it.

changing a function's type and then recompiling gives you a pretty  
useful todo-list though.  :)

> - quick navigation (goto symbol,

if you run hasktags you can use M-.

> goto instance,

not sure, maybe one could cook something up using grep or even hasktags

> find usages, etc)

M-x grep RET downarrow RET


> - code completion

either you use shim or the built-in M-/, which completes everything  
(not semantically sensitive, though)

> - "debugging" (not imperative debugging, so no breakpoints, but just
> plugging in a visualizer/pretty printer for a function in a separate
> dedicated window, like what http://www.apple.com/shake does on each  
> "node")

i don't know shake, can you explain a bit more?

ghc HEAD has the ghci debugger, haven't tried it

>
> So a bit what Jetbrains Resharper does for Visual Studio, but for  
> Haskell.
> IntelliJ and Eclipse also do this for Java.
>
> This does not seem to exist? If this is correct, this is a real shame,
> because although I read that the productivity increases a lot when  
> correctly
> using Haskell, it would increase even more when such an IDE is  
> available.

i agree

/ Thomas





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