RE: Text.ParserCombinators.Parsec requires -package text.

On 07 September 2004 02:21, Dean Herington wrote:

> At 1:52 PM +0100 9/6/04, Simon Marlow wrote:
>> On 06 September 2004 13:43, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
>> 
>>>  * The link step needs -package flags, because it only gets .o
>>>  files, and we didn't want it to start hunting through .hi files
>>>  (though that would be possible)
>> 
>> Just to expand on this a little: it's not clear that we could do this
>> even if we wanted to.  Given an arbitrary .o file, we can't tell (a)
>> if it is a compiled Haskell module and (b) if so, where its .hi file
>> can be found.  We can make guesses, but there isn't a general
>> solution. Guessing is a bit distasteful because guaranteed there
>> would be people who would be confused when the guesses turned out to
>> be wrong for their specific situation.
> 
> Couldn't the .hi file contents be put in the .o file itself, in a
> separate section not loaded into memory?  The presence of such a
> section would indicate that the .o file was compiled Haskell (or,
> perhaps, compiled GHC).  Tool and platform restrictions admittedly
> might make this difficult or impractical.

Hmm, now there's an interesting idea...

Simon