[redirected to haskell-cafe] Jón Fairbairn wrote:

1. Why "-f" anyway? It took me ages to work out what "-fallow-overlapping-instances" meant -- I wondered how "fallow" could apply to overlapping instances.

I believe the authors of GHC followed the naming conventions of GCC, which can be gleaned from GCC's info page. -warning-related options typically start with -W -machine-independent flags that control optimization, code-generation or language dialects start with -f. Most flags have positive and negative forms. -many pre-processor-related options start with -i -hardware-dependent options start with -m, e.g., -mcpu=i686 -mno-fancy-math-387 -malign-int -mno-power [RS/6000-related option] -myellowknife [On embedded PowerPC systems, assume that the startup module is called `crt0.o' and the standard C libraries are `libyk.a' and `libc.a'] Of possible interest is a file gcc-2.95.2/gcc/future.options from GCC's source code. The file lists a few suggested options. The file is an e-mail message from Noah Friedman to Richard Stallman, Jim Blandy and a few other people. Some of the suggested options are: -Waggravate-return -Wcast-spell -Wcaste-align [cf. the existing GCC option -Wcast-align] -Win [I guess warn about the Windows system] -Wmissing-protons -Wredundant-repetitions -antsy -fbungee-jump -fexpensive-operations [cf. -fexpensive-optimizations] -fextra-strength [must be a negative form of -fstrength-reduce] -fkeep-programmers-inline [cf. the existing option -fkeep-inline-functions] -fjesus-saves [cf. the existing option -fcaller-saves] -fno-peeping-toms [cf. the existing option -fno-peephole] -fruit-roll-ups [cf. the existing option -funroll-loops] -fshort-enough -mno-dialogue -vomit-frame-pointer