Daniel While I'm sure many understand and sympathise with your pain I wonder if you're being a little harsh. I mean <controversial> who's really using Solaris these days? </controversial> :-p ok,ok, lots of people (but will they really continue to - we dropped it from our labs long ago). Having said that, how many people don't have access to a Windoze or Linux / <platforms GHC runs on> box - very few. GHC works like a dream 'straight out of the box' on the supported platforms and the GHC team put a lot of effort in to making sure this is so!
Some software isn't user friendly. But I think that a compiler requiring itself to compile is actively user hostile.
While this might be true, having a compiler compile itself is massively important - many like to say (and I completely agree) that you are 'forced to eat your own dog food'. What better way to stress your compiler and optimiser?
At this point I decide that I'll teach people Python instead of Haskell. I don't particularly like Python, but hey, it works.
It'd really depend on the purpose for which you are 'teaching' people as to which language makes more sense... I for one am very glad that I was taught Miranda (Haskell has now replaced it here at Imperial) with it's clean functional syntax... Cheers Andy ********************************************************************* * Andrew Cheadle email: a.cheadle@doc.ic.ac.uk * * Department of Computing http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~amc4/ * * Imperial College * * University of London * *********************************************************************