At The University of Western Australia, we use Hugs 98 on Macintoshes to teach Foundations of Computer Science to approximately 300 first-year students (http://undergraduate.cs.uwa.edu.au/courses/230.123). Currently we use Hugs 98 on MacOS 8.6. We're likely to change to MacOS X for 2003, and we're likely to continue using Hugs 98 on that platform.
We are considering applying to the Apple University Development Fund for support to build an integrated development environment for MacOS X based on the (already-ported) Hugs engine. We're not thinking of a huge project: probably initially we will build something roughly like the MacGofer environment (those were the days!), with an integrated editor, command-line editing, colour-coded syntax a la the Haskell-mode in emacs, etc. With the size (and general naivety) of the class, the initial emphasis will be on reliability.
My questions are:
1. Would this be of interest to other groups who use Hugs on Macintoshes? (Statements of interest may increase our chances of success with AUDF.)
I think this would be of interest to a large portion of the Mac users. The download figures for Hugs-Dec2001 show that a majority of Hugs users on the Mac has switched to MacOS X already.
2. Is anyone working on this sort of environment already?
To my knowledge - no.
3. Does anyone know any reason that this sort of endeavour might be harder than we expect?
Nope, especially not if the application is set up to launch the standard Hugs distribution as a subprocess. I really hope you'll be able to find funding for this project! Good luck, Johan