hbc

[John Meacham]

you forget one other essential quality of hbc. 
As far as I know it is the only compiler that even has a chance of
compiling Fudgets, and hence programs dependent on them such as 
the very cool (IMHO) Alfa proof editor
(http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~hallgren/Alfa/)
and its assosiated improvments to Fudgets. If there is any effort to
port these tools to a modern haskell system then I cheer you on.
	John


On Wed, Jun 20, 2001 at 10:06:24AM +0200, Patrik Jansson wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Jun 2001, Andre W B Furtado wrote:
> > It is still possible to make hbc reach Haskell 98?
> 
> In short: Hbc is not quite dead yet, and there is a H98 version.
> 
> In detail:
> 
> [Note: I'm no expert in compiler writing, nor do I support hbc. I just
>  happen to work at Chalmers in the office between Lennart Augustsson's
>  (main architect and implementor of hbc, now in industry) and Thomas
>  Hallgren's (still actively using and sometimes hacking hbc).
> ]
> 
> The latest unofficial release is a Haskell 98 version of hbc, from 1999.
> Below are some links.
> 
> There has been no official release for the last few years and the support
> level is pretty low, but the compiler exists and can be used.
> Unfortunately the web-pages and the documentation has not been updated the
> last few years!
> 
> One notable feature in hbc still missing in ghc is Unicode support (hbc
> has supported Unicode from early on). I hope ghc will follow up the recent
> change to Unicode-sized Chars with some library support soon.
> 
> Many years ago a big benefit of hbc was its interactive variant hbi, only
> very recently implemented by ghc, but hbi is even less supported than hbc
> and I have only tried it once or twice. [I'd be very happy to hear someone
> more involved in developing hbc and hbi come forward and disprove this
> claim by providing a new release.]
> 
> When it comes to speed I am pretty sure ghc produces faster code (it used
> to be different, but that is a while ago) and I think hbc compiles faster
> nowadays "only" because it does less work in producing good code.
> 
> /Patrik Jansson
> 
> Versions of hbc98:
> 
> http://www.cs.chalmers.se/pub/users/hallgren/Alfa/Haskell/
> 
> Binary distributions of the latest unofficial release: 0.9999.5b
> 
> http://www.cs.chalmers.se/pub/users/hallgren/Alfa/Haskell/hbc-0.9999.5b.bin-i386-linux-libcv6.tar.gz
> http://www.cs.chalmers.se/pub/users/hallgren/Alfa/Haskell/hbc-0.9999.5b.bin-i386-linux-redhat-6.tar.gz
> http://www.cs.chalmers.se/pub/users/hallgren/Alfa/Haskell/hbc-0.9999.5b.bin-i386-netbsdELF.tar.gz
> 
> Source snapshot:
> 
> http://www.cs.chalmers.se/pub/users/hallgren/Alfa/Haskell/snapshot/1999-09-10/
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
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John Meacham   http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~john/
California Institute of Technology, Alum.  john@repetae.net
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