[Haskell-cafe] HaRe (the Haskell Refactorer) in action - short screencast

[Deniz Dogan]

2009/6/23 Claus Reinke <claus.reinke at talk21.com>:
> I've heard that many Haskellers know HaRe only as a rumour. It has been many
> years since the original project finished, and HaRe hasn't
> been maintained for quite some time, so just pointing to the sources isn't
> quite the right answer.
> The sources are still available, and build with GHC 6.8.3 (I had to fix
> one lineending issue on windows, iirc, and copy one old bug fix that
> hadn't made it into the latest release), but there is currently noone with
> the time or funding for maintenance, fixing bugs, making releases, or
> ironing out practical issues. If anyone would provide funding, people to do
> the work could be found, but the effort would probably be better spent on
> reimplementing the ideas in a GHC / Cabal environment (instead of the
> Haskell'98 environment targetted by our "Refactoring Functional Programs"
> project). If you've got the funding, please get
> in touch - even a three month run could get something started at least!-)
>
> In principle, the project experiences and lessons learned are quite well
> documented at the project site
>   http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/refactor-fp/
>
> but that doesn't give anyone an idea of what working with HaRe was like.
> With the recent interest in screencasts, I thought I'd make a little
> demo, for archival purposes. Nothing fancy, using only features that were
> already present in HaRe 0.3 (end of 2004), and not all of those, on a tiny
> 2-module example (screenspace is a bit crowded to keep the text readable on
> YouTube).
> I hope it might give a rough idea of what the papers, slides and reports are
> talking about, for Haskellers who weren't around at the time:
>
>   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I7VZV7elnY
>
> For the old HaRe team,
> Claus
>
> ------------------- YouTube video description:
> HaRe - the Haskell Refactorer (a mini demo) [4:10]
>
> The Haskell Refactorer HaRe was developed in our EPSRC project
> "Refactoring Functional Programs"
> http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/refactor-fp/ Building on Programatica's
> Haskell-in-Haskell frontend and Strafunski's generic programming library, it
> supported module-aware refactorings over the full Haskell'98 language
> standard. Interfaces to the refactoring engine were provided for both Vim
> and Emacs (this demo uses HaRe via GVim on Windows).
>
> While HaRe has continued to see occasional contributions by students and
> researchers, who use its Haskell program transformation API as a platform
> for their own work, it is not currently maintained. As the Haskell
> environment marches on, this demo is meant to record a snapshot of what
> working with HaRe could be like when it still built (here with GHC 6.8.3).
> The lessons learned (note, eg, the preservation of comments, and the limited
> use of pretty-printing, to minimize layout changes) are well documented at
> the project site, and should be taken into account when porting the ideas to
> the GHC Api, or other Haskell frontends.
>
>
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It would be interesting to see if the Yi developers could implement
some of this functionality for the Haskell mode, which has become
quite nice and is under active development. It already has a
"dollarification" function which converts stuff like "hello (there
(how (are you)))" into "hello $ there $ how $ are you" (I'm bad at
coming up with examples).

-- 
Deniz Dogan