Haskell Implemetors Meeting

Ch. A. Herrmann herrmann@infosun.fmi.uni-passau.de
Mon, 5 Feb 2001 18:53:07 +0100 (MET)


Dear Haskellers,

>>>>> "Simon" == Simon Peyton-Jones <simonpj@microsoft.com> writes:

    Simon>         We agreed that it would be a Jolly Good Thing if GHC
    Simon> could be persuaded to produce GHC-independent Core output,
    Simon> ready to feed into some other compiler.  For example,
    Simon> Karl-Filip might be able to use it. ANDREW will write a
    Simon> specification, and implement it.

a good idea. Before ANDREW will put a lot of effort in the specification
and implementation, it would be good to have a discussion about the core 
representation that is gradually evolving. There is the risk
that the representation, made by insiders, will be too complicated
to be used by several other people as I feel the core output
currently produced by GHC is.

It would be good to put all stuff related to this topic onto a
WWW page, containing links to relevant papers, conventions,
example pairs (Haskell source,core equivalent) which can be
discussed. 

Before coming to the syntax, there are some interesting
semantical questions that may be obvious for the implementers
but not for the user, e.g., the data types that must be provided
by a back-end for the core and the operational semantics of
pattern matching and let-expressions etc. 

A toy interpreter (e.g., using happy) which 
interprets the core language and which is written with the goal of 
documentation, not under efficiency aspects, may be helpful.
I'm not sure whether you like the idea, but a quick solution for
a small subset of Haskell would, in my opinion, be smarter
to the user, since her or she can get used to the representation
and we have something concrete to discuss. 

Many thanks in advance!
-- 
 Christoph Herrmann
 E-mail:  herrmann@fmi.uni-passau.de
 WWW:     http://brahms.fmi.uni-passau.de/cl/staff/herrmann.html