Hi Jared,
(1) I had to set up an environment variable YHC_BASE_PATH to point there Yes, YHC_BASE_PATH is an ugly wart in the YHC compiler, we're going to do some work to try and remove it, or at least make it required less often. Ideally it should "guess" where your base path is, and YHC_BASE_PATH should only be for people who want to put it somewhere weird. YHC_BASE_PACKAGE should point at the inst directory. Its used so the compiler and runtime can find the Haskell packages.
The question is, why does running my factorial program trigger a Data.Ratio error? Because you used numbers, that requires Data.Ratio. If your program had been putStrLn "hello world" then this wouldn't have happened. Its unfortunate that particular .hbc file is not copied by the makefile - thats a bug in the makefile! For now just manually copy the Ratio.hbc over.
... I can't really get most of the test suite to run. (Here is a link to the error output stream of runtests.py: http://www.updike.org/~jared/here/err.txt (164kB)) The python script is now depreciated, in src/tester there is a new Haskell testing script. No one has yet run it from Unix, but its built on Windows.
Your test report isn't that bad - the latest windows version gives this: http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~ndm/yhc/report.html - you can see there are still quite a lot of failures. Most of those problems are pretty trivial - missing modules and other small things. We will probably have a good go at reducing the regression test errors to 0 in January sometime. btw, your emails both sent to the list successfully. With regards to your comments about flat vs heirarchical: The original flat module space is defined in the Haskell 98 report, and used by lots of Haskell programs. Since that time, Heirarchical modules were introduced which include lots of additional functionality. yhc-base is the standard modules for Yhc, and these do most of the work. The flat module structure is retained for compatability with programs using the Haskell98 module structure, most of these just import the appropriate heirarchical module and re-export stuff.
P.S. I am still really excited about YHC! Good :) I hope we can get you through these little glitches! If you have anymore questions just send an email off to us.
Thanks Neil