Dear GHC users This message is a request for help with a well-contained task that will improve GHC's Haddock documentation. GHC provides lots of primitive operations. They are described in a single ASCII files primpos.txt.pp; the description in that file gives types and English-language descriptions, as well as some other GHC-ish information. This description file is chomped up by a pre-processor (genprimopcode), which produces either (a) Haskell source code for data types describing the primops [these modules become part of GHC itself), or (b) Latex stuff which can be part of a document. You can see the output in Section 4.4 of the External Core document (http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/papers/core.ps.gz) However, there's no Haddock document describing all these primops!! Although they are all available through the module GHC.Exts, the Haddock documentation for GHC.Exts says nothing at all about them. http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/GHC.Exts.html Reason: there is no Haskell source code for GHC.Prim, the pseudo-module that exports all the primops. What we want is to generate GHC.Prim.hs from primops.txt.pp. This .hs file would not be fed to GHC; rather it'd just be there so that Haddock could see it. For example: module GHC.Prim( ...list all primops... ) where (+#) :: Int# -> Int# -> Int# --| Adds two unboxed Ints ...etc... you get the idea. No Haskell code, only type signatures. Would someone cares to write this new backend to "genprimopcode". The latter is a Haskell program that can parse primops.txt.pp, and already has two back ends (a) and (b) above. What we want is to add (c) generate Haskell that Haddock can understand. Note that the documentation itself is already written -- it's in primpos.txt.pp. That's what's so tantalising. All that we need is to mangle it into Haddock. Any volunteers? It doesn't involve touching GHC itself. "gemprimopcode" is a completely standalone Haskell program, currently some 730 lines long. Simon