[Haskell] Weaving the Web with Haskell

[Simon Marlow]

> On a tangentially related point, portability of several of 
> the existing
> standard hierarchical libraries is rather patchy too.  For instance,
> the main reason that nhc98 does not currently ship with System.Time
> from the base package, or any of the network or unix packages, is that
> the checked-in implementations have a tool-dependency on hsc2hs.
> (The latter does not appear to have a stand-alone distribution
> independent of ghc, so it would be necessary to incorporate 
> it into the
> nhc98 tree, and I don't currently have the time available to untangle
> hsc2hs's configuration and build system and re-tangle it for nhc98.)
> 
> I guess I'm with Sigbjorn on wanting to reduce the number of tool
> dependencies, even though I happen to like GreenCard and hsc2hs
> for what they can automate.  Or perhaps, rather than reducing the
> dependencies, I want to reduce their impact, by making the tools much
> easier to get hold of, configure, and install.

Splitting off hsc2hs into a standalone distribution wouldn't be too
difficult, and is definitely a worthwhile task if anyone would like to
take it on.  Looking at the sources, it has some #ifdef __NHC__ so it
looks like it worked on nhc98 at some point.

It's a single module Haskell program with an auxiliary file
(template-hsc.h).  It needs to know one or two things about the system:
what the C compiler is called, or where GHC can be found.  That's about
it, as far as I can tell.

Cheers,
	Simon