Ross Boylan wrote:
First, I'm really impressed with the fast and helpful responses from several people!
Ask an easy question and you'll get at least a dozen people tripping over each other in their rush to offer you useful advice. Ask a hard question, or an uninteresting question, and enjoy the utter silence... :-( Still, I suppose that's not *too* surprising.
I had thought HUGS made more sense for fiddling around, but it seems all I'm doing is loading files anyway. What is the style people use for this exploratory work? I've already installed haskell-mode for emacs and ghc6, but it's not clear to me to what extent the former servers as a development environment rather than just a language formatter.
I used to use Hugs as well. Then I updated to the newest version, and found it horrifically buggy. That's when I moved over to GHC. As Don said, GHCi doesn't let you define new functions like Hugs does, but other than that it's far more useful. (And actually, you *can* define small functions using 'let'. It's just awkward.) Best thing is, you can compile your code with GHC, and then load that compiled code into GHCi so it runs at near-native speed. And of course, the latest version of GHCi now comes with an actual debugger. And GHC-compiled binaries have a profiler. And... [This was a while ago; maybe Hugs has been updated again since I last looked. Certainly Hugs is smaller to download, and more friendly to use than GHC. But it just doesn't have the same power...]