you forget one other essential quality of hbc. As far as I know it is the only compiler that even has a chance of compiling Fudgets, and hence programs dependent on them such as the very cool (IMHO) Alfa proof editor (http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~hallgren/Alfa/) and its assosiated improvments to Fudgets. If there is any effort to port these tools to a modern haskell system then I cheer you on. John On Wed, Jun 20, 2001 at 10:06:24AM +0200, Patrik Jansson wrote:
On Tue, 19 Jun 2001, Andre W B Furtado wrote:
It is still possible to make hbc reach Haskell 98?
In short: Hbc is not quite dead yet, and there is a H98 version.
In detail:
[Note: I'm no expert in compiler writing, nor do I support hbc. I just happen to work at Chalmers in the office between Lennart Augustsson's (main architect and implementor of hbc, now in industry) and Thomas Hallgren's (still actively using and sometimes hacking hbc). ]
The latest unofficial release is a Haskell 98 version of hbc, from 1999. Below are some links.
There has been no official release for the last few years and the support level is pretty low, but the compiler exists and can be used. Unfortunately the web-pages and the documentation has not been updated the last few years!
One notable feature in hbc still missing in ghc is Unicode support (hbc has supported Unicode from early on). I hope ghc will follow up the recent change to Unicode-sized Chars with some library support soon.
Many years ago a big benefit of hbc was its interactive variant hbi, only very recently implemented by ghc, but hbi is even less supported than hbc and I have only tried it once or twice. [I'd be very happy to hear someone more involved in developing hbc and hbi come forward and disprove this claim by providing a new release.]
When it comes to speed I am pretty sure ghc produces faster code (it used to be different, but that is a while ago) and I think hbc compiles faster nowadays "only" because it does less work in producing good code.
/Patrik Jansson
Versions of hbc98:
http://www.cs.chalmers.se/pub/users/hallgren/Alfa/Haskell/
Binary distributions of the latest unofficial release: 0.9999.5b
http://www.cs.chalmers.se/pub/users/hallgren/Alfa/Haskell/hbc-0.9999.5b.bin-... http://www.cs.chalmers.se/pub/users/hallgren/Alfa/Haskell/hbc-0.9999.5b.bin-... http://www.cs.chalmers.se/pub/users/hallgren/Alfa/Haskell/hbc-0.9999.5b.bin-...
Source snapshot:
http://www.cs.chalmers.se/pub/users/hallgren/Alfa/Haskell/snapshot/1999-09-1...
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-- -------------------------------------------------------------- John Meacham http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~john/ California Institute of Technology, Alum. john@repetae.net --------------------------------------------------------------