SPJ may answered part of it in his talk Escape from the ivory tower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re96UgMk6GQ&feature=share from about 29 minutes.

On Sat, Dec 16, 2017 at 21:17 Brandon Allbery <allbery.b@gmail.com> wrote:
Dunno about safety results, but https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/ exists (next revision expected in 2020 iirc). https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/lang.html documents ghc's extensions to the standard, and https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/bugs.html#haskell-standards-vs-glasgow-haskell-language-non-compliance its deviations from the standard, some of which will likely be in the next standard.

Some things, such as how typeclasses are implemented, are not specified in the standard so that alternative implementations can choose to implement them differently. ghc uses dictionary / record parameters; jhc did whole program compilation, so all non-polymorphically-recursive typeclass methods could be resolved at compile time (I don't know offhand how it handled polymorphic recursion).

On Sat, Dec 16, 2017 at 11:43 PM, Todd Wilson <twilson@csufresno.edu> wrote:
Why doesn't Haskell (or at least "core" Haskell) have a formal definition and safety result the way Standard ML does [1], [2]? Is it just that no one has gotten around to producing them, or because there are fundamental difficulties that stand in the way of completing such a project?

Todd Wilson

[1] Robin Milner, Mads Tofte, Robert Harper, and David MacQueen. The Definition of Standard ML (Revised). MIT Press, 1997.
[2] Daniel K. Lee , Karl Crary , Robert Harper, "Mechanizing the Metatheory of Standard ML", http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dklee/tslf/

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--
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
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