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

[Andrew Coppin]

Dan Piponi wrote:
> This isn't a question specific to ghc.

Most certainly not. ;-) (Well, except that I asked "where did GHC come 
from", which is pretty GHC-specific.)

However, it seems the general point of confusion is that writing (say) a 
minimally-working C compiler intuitively "seems" quite easy (after all, 
C is an extremely low-level language), whereas the constructs in Haskell 
bear no resemblence to any machine-level constructs, and it "seems" 
unthinkable that you could possibly write such a compiler in anything 
but Haskell itself.

> In general, the process of
> bootstrapping compilers and porting them to new platforms can be
> described by T-diagrams. When I did a web search on T-diagrams the
> first hit I found,
> http://proglang.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/teaching/compilerbau/2004/T-diagrams.pdf
> seemed to summarise them well.
>   
Ooo... interesting.