haskell in a programming languages course?

[Fred Hosch]

For the time in MANY years, I'm scheduled to teach a junior-senior
level programming languages course this fall. Our students are --
uhhh -- shall we say "marginal"? (I mean, this is no Mississippi State
after all.)

I've looked at a number of possible textbooks and found them to be
disappointingly shallow. (Well, THIS one's pretty good, but it assumes
a knowledge of Scheme. sigh.) So I thought that maybe I'd do the course
as it was done in olden times, as a case study of a few languages using
the standards documents.

I'm looking for a nice functional language to present, and Haskell seems
an obvious choice. (I've dabbled a bit with ML and Miranda years ago, but
haven't really done anything with Haskell.) The Haskell report, however,
seems a bit daunting, particularly for our troops. (C'mon, one of you guys
is really van Wijngaarden, right?) So I'm looking for suggestions: is
there anything out there that's a bit more of a technical look at the language
than "How to program in Haskell" but more approachable than the report?
Or is Haskell not the right thing to try?

Thanks for any input. Hope I didn't interrupt any serious threads on the list.

Fred Hosch                                      fred@cs.uno.edu
Computer Science Department                     (504)-280-6594
University of New Orleans                       (504)-280-7228 (fax)
New Orleans, LA  70148