[cvs-nhc98] Legacy question

[Malcolm Wallace]

Sven Panne <Sven.Panne at aedion.de> writes:

> A few tools within nhc98 are built by the bootstrapping compiler:
> 
>     hmake, greencard, nhc98 itself, cpphs, and hsc2hs
> 
> My question is: What should be the minimum requirement for the bootstrapping
> compiler? Haskell 1.4? Haskell 98? The latter would be preferable IMHO,
> because we have quite a few Haskell-98-conformant systems nowadays :-) and
> the code could be cleaned up a bit.

I think that we ought to be able to assume Haskell'98 by now, but
unfortunately that excludes hbc and Helium, leaving only ghc, Hugs,
and nhc98 itself.

However, the nightly hbc builds have been broken for a long time
anyway, and I haven't had any motivation to fix them, so I wouldn't
object to removing any older, 1.4-related stuff.  Since nhc98 is
self-bootstrapping via C, I can't see any good reason to continue to
support older versions of ghc either.

Regards,
    Malcolm