leather:
2. What is the difference between "Haskell" and the "Haskell Platform"? I see one or the other in various places. To get from www.haskell.org to downloading the Mac software, I go through "Download Haskell," "Get the Haskell Platform > Mac," and "Download Haskell for Mac OS X (intel)."
Well, for one, we have characterized the difference between GHC and the Haskell Platform as: GHC is to the HP as Linux Kernel is to Linux Now, "Haskell" for newcomers might mean "toolchain on my machine" -- which is the Haskell Platform. Or it might mean the language. We try to ensure advertising for the HP makes it simple: "Download Haskell", but documentation pages carefully describe the fact that the HP is a development environment for the Haskell language.
3. By looking at http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/mac.html , I have no idea what I'm going to get when I click the "Download Haskell for Mac OS X (intel)" link. It would be nice to know what I'm getting myself into before I commit to waiting for this 137.9 MB file. Thanks to the wonder of deep links, one can also not be expected to traverse the path that I did in #2. Similarly, if I come to this link directly, I have no easy way of navigating to try to figure out what "Haskell" or "GHC" is.
That's a bug. I've filed a ticket to fix the website.
-- Don