| Safe Haskell | None |
|---|---|
| Language | Haskell98 |
Language.Haskell.Meta.Parse.Careful
Description
DEPRECATED: haskell-src-meta now requires GHC >= 7.4, so this module is no longer necessary. It will be GHC-warning deprecated soon.
This module provides the tools to handle operator fixities in infix expressions correctly.
The problem we solve is the following. Consider making a quasiquoter which antiquotes to Haskell - for instance, the quasiquoter in http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hmatrix-static allows me to write
myVec :: Vector Double myVec = [vec| 2+3*4, 5-4-3 |]
To correctly parse such expressions, we need to know the fixities and precedences of the operators, so that the above is parsed the same way as
myVec = [vec| 2+(3*4), (5-4)-3 |]
There is a danger, if we are not careful in parsing, that the above expression instead parses as
myVec = [vec| (2+3)*4, 5-(4-3) |]
which is a surprising bug, and would only be detected through testing at runtime, rather than at compile time.
When this danger arises, we use this "careful" module. It handles "unresolved infix" expressions such as 2+3*4 in two ways, depending on the version of GHC:
- in GHC 7.4 and above (where support for "unresolved infix" was added in Template Haskell), resolution of the infix expression is deferred to the compiler, which has all fixities available to it.
- prior to GHC 7.4, any ambiguous infix expression is flagged as a parse error at compile time, and the user is advised to resolve the ambiguity by adding parentheses.