[Hugs-users] Hugs98-plus-Sept2006

[dfeustel at mindspring.com]

> On Sat, Dec 09, 2006 at 03:32:22PM +0000, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> > As for the primitive operations, you shouldn't use them, ever. If you
> > want to add two things use (+). They are merely an internal
> > implementation detail, which I guess should never have been available
> > to the user in the first place, and now isn't. I guess its a shame
> > that a book that is only 2 years old is out of date, perhaps you might
> > want to contact the authors to give them this information, so they can
> > put it on a web page or something and save other people this
> > confusion.
> 
> Yes, these were internal details of the Hugs implementation of the
> Prelude, and shouldn't have been exposed.  They were only ever visible
> when the Prelude was the current module, and have been properly hidden
> since the November 2002 release.
> 
> But since they existed only to implement Haskell 98, there are always
> Haskell 98 alternatives, e.g. minBound::Int for primMinInt, as already
> mentioned.

I have now determined to my satisfaction that Hugs98-plus-Sept2006 has
initialization problems concerning Prelude.hs and the use of the -P option.
These problems may be peculiar to the port of Hugs to OpenBSD. In any event
I have started poking around with gdb to try to figure out what's going on.
(I actually can induce hugs to recognize the various prim functions that
I initially had trouble with, but it's clear that Prelude processing does
not work exactly as documented.)

Dave Feustel