I agree with Neil. Translators are very difficult to do right, except for the most trivial transformations.<br>Changing tabs to spaces is about as far as I would trust an automatic translator.<br><br> -- Lennart<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">
On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 9:21 AM, Neil Mitchell <<a href="mailto:ndmitchell@gmail.com">ndmitchell@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Hi<br>
<br>
I think Henrik's criteria are pretty close to perfect.<br>
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
> As I have argued before on the committee list, I also think we should *not*<br>
> worry about backwards incompatible changes too much in cases where a simple<br>
> automatic translation from H98 to H' code is possible. Even for a large<br>
> project, it is IMHO no big hardship to run a H98->H' translator over all<br>
> Haskell sources.<br>
<br>
</div>Some questions:<br>
<br>
1) Will I (the programmer) have to mode switch in painful ways between<br>
H98 and H'? Do I have to learn a pile of exceptions, or is there some<br>
common rule that works? (i.e. removing n+k is fine since I just don't<br>
learn it, changing the fixity of $ is not since I need to know both)<br>
<br>
2) Will tool T (the translator) work on academic papers that have<br>
previously been published.<br>
<br>
3) Will tool T handle all of GHC's extensions.<br>
<br>
4) Will tool T deal with things like CPP, hsc, trhsx, happy, alex<br>
etc... - all these file formats which include embedded Haskell.<br>
<br>
5) Will tool T ever exist.<br>
<br>
I think the answer to 2-5 is nearly certainly going to be "No". I<br>
don't think the relevance of a conversion tool should even be<br>
considered until some person steps forward and says without doubt that<br>
_they_ will write the converter. Even if they did there very best, it<br>
still won't be trivial to use in all cases.<br>
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
> As John Launchbury has said, given Haskell's current rise in popularity, anything that<br>
> we do not fix with H' will be much harder, if not impossible, to fix in the future.<br>
<br>
</div>That is a very good point. Perhaps we're already a little too late.<br>
<br>
Thanks<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
Neil<br>
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