HI
For me, the unfortunate thing is that there seems to be no interpreter for Haskell written in Haskell. (Except for GHC, which is *huge*.)
What do you mean by *huge*? Takes up to much memory at runtime? Requires too long to compile? Has had too many experts spending lots of time writing it? A large volume of source code isn't a negative, unless you are expected to do something with it that involves modifying a large chunk of it.
We have a Haskell parser [which is complex beyond usability]
Which takes a Haskell file and produces an abstract syntax tree representing Haskell? I'm not sure how that's complex, it does exactly what it says on the tin - it parses Haskell.
them find it doesn't implement Haskell precisely. So it looks like I'm stuck with present technology - and that essentially means GHC. (Other compilers? What other compilers??)
Yhc, Hugs, JHC...
As far as I know, hs-plugins works by taking an expression, writing it to a file, calling GHC to parse it, transform it to Core, optimise it, transform it to STG, optimise it, transform it to C--, optimise it, transform it to ANSI C, optimise it, pass it to GCC, compile it, link it, and *then* using the GHC runtime linker to load the generated object code into memory, type-check it, and, finally, execute it.
Are you complaining that this process is too slow? Complaints about speed should take the form "I expected this to happen in 3 seconds, it requires 12". You can't have a complaint about it doing clever things automatically for you, only that the results of those clever things don't meet your needs.
Whatever... I'd just like to see an online way to run Haskell, and since the Lambdabot webpage still shows no sign of working...
Writing a Haskell interpreter seems like a lot of work, if all you want is "a few tweaks to lambdabot". Of course, a Haskell interpreter is something I'd love to see :) Thanks Neil