[moving to haskell-cafe]
From: matt hellige [mailto:matt@immute.net] a quick question re: ghc's Core language... is it still very similar to the abstract syntax given in, for example, santos' "compilation by transformation..." (i think it was his dissertation?) and elsewhere, or has it changed significantly in the last couple of years? i only ask because i know the language used in that paper is somewhat different from the Core language given in peyton jones and lester's "implementing functional languages" from 92, and includes type annotations and so on.
m
The current Core language is still quite similar to what is described in Santos' work; see SL Peyton Jones and A Santos, "A transformation-based optimiser for Haskell," Science of Computer Programming 32(1-3), pp3-47, September 1998. http://research.microsoft.com/Users/simonpj/papers/comp-by-trans-scp.ps.gz But there have been some noticeable changes; for example, function arguments are no longer required to be atomic. A more recent version of Core is partially described (omitting types) in SL Peyton Jones & S Marlowe, "Secrets of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler Inliner," IDL'99. http://research.microsoft.com/Users/simonpj/papers/inline.ps.gz