[Haskell-cafe] Somewhat random history question - chicken and egg

[Stefan O'Rear]

On Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 11:07:29AM +0000, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> Hi
> 
> > > "...if GHC is written in Haskell, how the heck did they compile GHC in
> > > the first place?"
> 
> GHC was not the first Haskell compiler, hbc was the main compiler at
> some point, so I suspect they used hbc. There was also lazy ML which I
> suspect was used to bootstrap hbc - but I'm not sure of the details.

Hbc didn't need to be bootstrapped because it isn't written in Haskell -
it's written in Lazy ML.  Lazy ML would need to be bootstrapped, but
since it has (almost?) the same syntax as Standard ML, I suspect the
first versions of lml were written in SML.  (Can you clarify,
L. Augustsson?)

Stefan
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