Is there a quick-starting Haskell interpreter suitable for scripting?

Question

Does anyone know of a quick-starting Haskell interpreter that would be suitable for use in writing shell scripts? Running \'hello world\' using Hugs took 400ms on my old laptop

Answer 1

Why not create a script front-end that compiles the script if it hasn't been before or if the compiled version is out of date.

Here's the basic idea, this code could be improved a lot--search the path rather then assuming everything's in the same directory, handle other file extensions better, etc. Also i'm pretty green at haskell coding (ghc-compiled-script.hs):

import Control.Monad
import System
import System.Directory
import System.IO
import System.Posix.Files
import System.Posix.Process
import System.Process

getMTime f = getFileStatus f >>= return . modificationTime

main = do
  scr : args <- getArgs
  let cscr = takeWhile (/= '.') scr

  scrExists <- doesFileExist scr
  cscrExists <- doesFileExist cscr
  compile <- if scrExists && cscrExists
               then do
                 scrMTime <- getMTime scr
                 cscrMTime <- getMTime cscr
                 return $ cscrMTime <= scrMTime
               else
                   return True

  when compile $ do
         r <- system $ "ghc --make " ++ scr
         case r of
           ExitFailure i -> do
                   hPutStrLn stderr $
                            "'ghc --make " ++ scr ++ "' failed: " ++ show i
                   exitFailure
           ExitSuccess -> return ()

  executeFile cscr False args Nothing

Now we can create scripts such as this (hs-echo.hs):

#! ghc-compiled-script

import Data.List
import System
import System.Environment

main = do
  args <- getArgs
  putStrLn $ foldl (++) "" $ intersperse " " args

And now running it:

$ time hs-echo.hs "Hello, world\!"     
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( hs-echo.hs, hs-echo.o )
Linking hs-echo ...
Hello, world!
hs-echo.hs "Hello, world!"  0.83s user 0.21s system 97% cpu 1.062 total

$ time hs-echo.hs "Hello, world, again\!"
Hello, world, again!
hs-echo.hs "Hello, world, again!"  0.01s user 0.00s system 60% cpu 0.022 total