Malcolm:
Not entirely true. A large chunk of the nhc98 (and hat) libraries is copied directly from the Report.
I think we all copied from the report originally - the problem is that we fix our copies of the code and forget to fix the original. The method I described was intended to let me run off the actual files used in the report.
This has been said before, but maybe we need someone to formulate a huge set of QuickCheck properties about the Prelude/Libraries. That would root out quite a lot of remaining bugs relatively quickly I suspect.
I think we'd want a modified version of quickcheck which generated a file of results which were then checked by an external tool. The problem being that there's a wide range of compiler bugs which can make a program return 'True' without actually executing the program correctly. With that modification, I strongly agree. -- Alastair