Literate Haskell specification

Isaac Dupree isaacdupree at charter.net
Tue May 29 12:21:28 EDT 2007


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Isaac Dupree wrote:
> As I brought up earlier in Haskell-cafe
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/20026
> , the Haskell98 specification for literate haskell (report section 9.4)
> could use some work, at least clarifications (existing haskell
> implementations differ in some ways) - see that thread for details.
> Since I haven't successfully gotten to writing a concrete revision of
> that section, I thought I'd at least bring the issue to the attention of
> specifically haskell-prime people, as it is an issue that "should
> definitely" be addressed in the Report.  Hopefully there's someone
> around here who might tackle it :)

Like myself :)

See
http://isaac.cedarswampstudios.org/2007/LiterateHaskellPrime/literate.html
for my draft (look in
http://isaac.cedarswampstudios.org/2007/LiterateHaskellPrime/ for source
files).  It needs feedback.

We could make the "not advisable" things be "if you allow them, they are
this way; but you don't need to allow them".  I have provided alternate
wordings for both possibilities in both places that my draft says
something is "not advisable". (is talking about "implementations" the
right way to go about wording it?)


Technical help needed:

There seems to be duplicate sections of the report for this "literate",
even in the source-files?? literate.verb and in syntax-iso.verb.  In
fact in the Haskell 98 revised online report Full Table of Contents, it
is duplicated, in sections 9.4 and 9.6.

What am I doing wrong that makes the layout of my BNF a little funny,
some spaces missing, some lines wrapped where they shouldn't be?

What is this \Haskell{} rather than just Haskell?  Assuming I should use
it... it inserts a space before my commas and periods, ("... Haskell ,
...") which is bad.

Does the
%
% $Header: /home/cvs/root/haskell-report/report/literate.verb,v 1.5
2002/12/02 14:53:30 simonpj Exp $
%
at the beginning of the files still make sense?  Should it be deleted?


Other observation:

The LaTeX-style example doesn't seem very good - e.g., beginning with
\documentstyle, and the lhs2TeX processor, don't go well together.
(apparently beginning with \documentclass instead is necessary to make
the \usepackage{..}s it generates work, and such a heading may not be
necessary at all for that...)


Isaac
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