[Haskell-cafe] RFC: "Native -XCPP" Proposal

Hello *, As you may be aware, GHC's `{-# LANGUAGE CPP #-}` language extension currently relies on the system's C-compiler bundled `cpp` program to provide a "traditional mode" c-preprocessor. This has caused several problems in the past, since parsing Haskell code with a preprocessor mode designed for use with C's tokenizer has caused already quite some problems[1] in the past. I'd like to see GHC 7.12 adopt an implemntation of `-XCPP` that does not rely on the shaky system-`cpp` foundation. To this end I've created a wiki page https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Proposal/NativeCpp to describe the actual problems in more detail, and a couple of possible ways forward. Ideally, we'd simply integrate `cpphs` into GHC (i.e. "plan 2"). However, due to `cpp`s non-BSD3 license this should be discussed and debated since affects the overall-license of the GHC code-base, which may or may not be a problem to GHC's user-base (and that's what I hope this discussion will help to find out). So please go ahead and read the Wiki page... and then speak your mind! Thanks, HVR [1]: ...does anybody remember the issues Haskell packages (& GHC) encountered when Apple switched to the Clang tool-chain, thereby causing code using `-XCPP` to suddenly break due to subtly different `cpp`-semantics?