Hoogle

A Haskell API search engine, written by Neil Mitchell. It allows you to search by either name, or by approximate type signature. An article is being written for TheMonadReader, which will include some technical details.

How to use Hoogle

• The web interface: http://haskell.org/hoogle
• The Lambdabot plugin, @hoogle and @hoogle+
• Download the source with Darcs (where did i put it again?)
• Download a command line version (yet to be released, but get the source and compile it yourself)
• A Mac OS X version (unreleased yet, but it does exist)

Examples

If you wanted to search for the standard prelude function map, you could type into the search any one of:

(a -> b) -> [a] -> [b]
(a -> a) -> [a] -> [a]
(Int -> Bool) -> [Int] -> [Bool]
[a] -> (a -> b) -> [b]

Todo

Admin

• Write a website build script
• get XHoogle in the repo

Short Term

i.e. before Hoogle3 goes public

• Fix parse errors, ) ->, ) ->@ , func :: With Type
• Regression tests for hoogle
• You cannot search for certain keywords, i.e. @, because it is not a recognised lex symbol
• Add comment characters, --, {- and -} to the list of symbols.
• Put back more detailed information about the Prelude functions, see LibraryDocumentation.

Medium Term

• Parameterise out by package, i.e. split off OpenGL
• Compile with Yhc and distribute
• Write GTK front end
• Firefox/Mozilla plugin
• Multiword search? power set
• Dehack the Score program
• Multiparameter type classes

Long Term

• Integration with Cabal
• Integration with http://darcs.augustsson.net/Darcs/Djinn

Hoogle Suggest

• People often type to, instead of ->
• Numeric literals
• Concepts? tuple, random, monads etc.
• Wrongly suggests capitals for t1 etc.

Bad Searches

• (a -> b) -> ([a] -> [b]) -- should find map
• @hoogle Data.IntMap.IntMap a -> [a] -- badly kills the module names

Higher Kinds

The following searches are all wrong because Hoogle doesn't understand higher kinds, i.e. Monad's.

• Functor f => (a -> b) -> f a -> f b -- should find fmap
• Monad m => [m a] -> m [a] -- should find sequence
• (Monad m) => m (m a) -> m a -- should find join