School of Computing

HEAT

The Haskell Educational Advancement Tool

HEAT is a simple integrated development environment (IDE) for Haskell. It combines a Haskell interpreter (currently GHCi) with an editor for writing Haskell programs and simple automatic testing.

Installing HEAT

Before you can use HEAT, the Haskell interpreter GHCi must be present. For simplicity we use the GHCi that comes with the Haskell Platform.

Haskell platform with GHCi

On Public PCs on campus

The Haskell platform is already installed. Check that it is present: 
Start
   -> All Programs
      -> Departmental Software
         -> School of Computing
            -> Haskell Platform 2011.2.0.1

If it is not there, then you have to run Additional Software from the desktop icon. Just click continue. This ensures that the menu entry above will appear.

On your own computer

Download the Haskell platform from its website and install it. There are installers for Windows, Mac and Linux. After successful installation check which path GHCi (the program ghci) has.

HEAT itself

Download the most recent version of HEAT from its website. It is a single jar file, e.g. Heat5.jar. Put it in your working directory for functional programming.

To start HEAT under Windows just double-click the jar file. Under other operating systems you may have to call Java with Heat5.jar (that is, java -jar Heat5.jar &) .

When you start HEAT for the first time, it will ask you for the path of the Haskell interpreter you are using (GHCi). On Public Windows machines the path should be 

C:\Program Files\Haskell Platform\2011.2.0.1\bin\ghci.exe

On your own PC the path depends on where you installed ghci as part of your Haskell platform installation.

Beware: If you enter the path of HEAT itself instead of ghci, HEAT will start itself again and again. Either quickly kill all HEAT processes or logout from Windows. To avoid HEAT repeating this when you call HEAT again, you have to remove the heat.settings file. This file is in the directory C:\Documents and Settings\abc where abc is your login.

In the lectures you have seen how to use HEAT. There are also some help pages availabe under the Help menu.

Please report any bugs you come across to Olaf Chitil.

School of Computing, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NF

Enquiries: +44 (0)1227 824180 or contact us.

Last Updated: 13/01/2012 17:13