On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 5:02 PM, Dominick Samperi <djsamperi@gmail.com> wrote:
Consequently, it refuses to install with the latest ghc provided with
the Haskell Platform (8.0.1).
base is not defined by the Platform, it is defined by (and ships with, and must completely match) ghc.
And no, backward compatibility is not guaranteed; for a recent example, ghc 7.10 broke many programs by making Applicative a "superclass" of Monad and by generalizing many Prelude functions to Foldable and/or Traversable.