Can't compile GHC

[Andrew Cheadle]

Daniel

While I'm sure many understand and sympathise with your pain I wonder if
you're being a little harsh.

I mean
<controversial>
who's really using Solaris these days?
</controversial>

:-p ok,ok, lots of people (but will they really continue to - we
dropped it from our labs long ago). Having said that, how many
people don't have access to a Windoze or Linux / <platforms GHC runs on>
box - very few. GHC works like a dream 'straight out of the box' on the
supported platforms and the GHC team put a lot of effort in to making
sure this is so!

>Some software isn't user friendly. But I think that a compiler requiring
>itself to compile is actively user hostile.

While this might be true, having a compiler compile itself is massively
important - many like to say (and I completely agree) that
you are 'forced to eat your own dog food'. What better way to stress
your compiler and optimiser?

>At this point I decide that I'll teach people Python instead of Haskell.
>I don't particularly like Python, but hey, it works.

It'd really depend on the purpose for which you are 'teaching' people as
to which language makes more sense... I for one am very glad that I was
taught Miranda (Haskell has now replaced it here at Imperial) with it's
clean functional syntax...

Cheers

Andy

*********************************************************************
*  Andrew Cheadle                    email:  a.cheadle at doc.ic.ac.uk *
*  Department of Computing           http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~amc4/ *
*  Imperial College                                                 *
*  University of London                                             *
*********************************************************************