[Haskell-cafe] haskell-src-exts Question

Duncan Coutts duncan.coutts at googlemail.com
Fri Nov 13 19:46:05 EST 2009


On Fri, 2009-11-13 at 23:54 +0100, Niklas Broberg wrote:
> > Surely you do want this. It's the biggest problem with the original
> > haskell-src package, that it cannot print out any useful Haskell code
> > obtained from the parser, because it forgets all the brackets.
> 
> I should point out that haskell-src-exts already fixes this for code
> obtained from the parser, by making the parser and AST remember the
> brackets. Or as you put it:
> 
> > It probably wants to be a combination of the parser, AST and pretty
> > printer.
> 
> Yes indeed.

Ok, I misunderstood.

> But the problem at hand here is auto-generated AST code, where we
> cannot rely on the parser to do the right thing. There's help in the
> AST such that it's possible to explicitly insert brackets where
> needed, but I agree with Dominic that it shouldn't really be necessary
> in his case.

> Neil's point is well taken though - to do it correctly (or rather,
> minimally) for infix application, the pretty printer would need to be
> aware of the respective fixities involved.

To do it minimally yes, but correctly? In the AST you've got

InfixApp Exp QOp Exp

so we know the tree structure, we just can't insert minimal brackets
without knowing the fixity.

> However, that doesn't mean we can't do better than what it is now, but
> be conservative about it. Only insert brackets where it's clear that
> brackets must be inserted, which would be the case for Dominic's
> example. If the argument to an application is non-atomic, it needs
> brackets, there's nothing ambiguous about that. Nothing can be said so
> categorically for infix applications, so there we should assume that
> the fixities are already done in the correct way, or that brackets are
> inserted manually where needed.
> 
> Does that sound reasonable?

So to be clear, currently the printing behaviour is that no brackets are
inserted for infix expressions which means the results are "wrong by
default" (for ASTs constructed manually, not via the parser) but on the
other hand this lets you insert the minimal (or pleasing) number of
brackets.

The suggestion is to move to a "safe/correct by default" where brackets
are inserted to preserve the tree structure of infix expressions. The
problem then becomes, what if we want to have the minimal (or pleasing
not-quite-minimal) number of brackets.

Right?

If I've understood right, then yes I think making the pretty printing
right by default is a good idea, and then for the users/applications
where optimising for fewer brackets is important, it should be a little
extra work to supply the necessary information.

Perhaps like the ParseMode has fixities :: [Fixity], give the PPHsMode
the same (partial) fixities environment. For operators not in the
environment we fall back to using brackets all the time, but for known
operators we can the use minimal bracketing.

Another option I suppose would be to annotate the QOp used in InfixApp
with a Maybe fixity. The parser would annotate these when it knows them
from its fixities env in the ParseMode. For ASTs constructed manually
the user would add them if they know or care. If not, they just get
slightly more brackets than might strictly be necessary if the fixity
were known.

Duncan



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