AFP - Compilers, Manuals and Tutorials

Compilers & Interpreters

hbc

is a compiler developed at Chalmers, by Lennart Augustsson and Thomas Johnsson. This is currently the only compiler that can be used for fudget programs. It runs under Unix, on a large number of platforms.

Hugs

is an interpreter written in C by Mark Jones. It is very convenient for prototyping since it parses and type-checks quickly. It does not implement the module system, but has so called constructor classes. There are versions for Unix as well as PC/MSDOS.

Gofer

is both the name of an interpreter and a language, also by Mark Jones. Gofer is similar to Haskell, but Mark Jones has added some interesting features, and omitted some. Runs on Unix / PC / Macintosh.

ghc

is a compiler developed by a team at Glasgow. Currently, it compiles slower than hbc, but the final code runs faster. It has a number of extensions to the Haskell language, such as parallel evaluation, monadic I/O, and the state transformer monad that John Launchbury's DFS algorithm has been implemented with.

Clean

is developed on Macintosh by a group at Nijmegen University. It is possible to write "real programs" with graphical user interfaces etc on Macs using Clean.

Erlang

is an untyped, strict functional language developed by Ericsson. It supports concurrency, real time programming and error handling (features which might be good to have when programming telephone exchanges).

The comp.lang.functional FAQ

has more stuff about various implementations.

Reference Manuals and Tutorials

Manuals

Haskell Report.

defines the language. Don't use it to learn the language, but as a reference. Many of the features of Haskell are put in the Standard Prelude as datatypes, classes and functions. The report includes a description of this.

Haskell Library Report.

defines the standard libraries. Functions in these libraries can be used only if the module they appear in is explicitly imported, but all implementations provide these modules. Many functions which were previously a part of the prelude (always available) have now moved into libraries. This version is a working draft, so subject to change.

Haskell B. user's manual (Lennart Augustsson)

describes hbc, in particular various handy flags that can be given to the compiler and the executables for doing heap profiling, for example. Also describes the hbc library, a number of useful functions that are not in the Standard Prelude.

Tutorials

A Gentle Introduction to Haskell ( Paul Hudak and Joseph Fasel), and

The Little Haskeller (John Hughes and Cordelia Hall),

are two tutorials on Haskell. The latter uses hbi, which is an interpreter accompanying hbc. Beware that these tutorials cover Haskell 1.2, whereas we are actually using the latest revision of the language, Haskell 1.3.

Functional Programming (Jeroen Fokker)

is based on Gofer, and is inspired by Bird and Wadler's book (see below).

Programming with Fudgets (Thomas Hallgren and Magnus Carlsson)

describes stream processors and the fudget library. There is also a reference manual on line about fudgets.

An Introduction to Gofer (Mark Jones)

is the Gofer language reference, and is also a good introduction.

There is also the book Introduction to Functional Programming (Richard Bird and Philip Wadler), from Prentice Hall. Uses the language Miranda which is one of the precursors to Haskell. The book emphasises mathematical techniques for reasoning about and deriving programs from their specification.

Another good reference is J. Jeuring & E. Meijer (Eds.): Advanced Functional Programming, LNCS 925, Springer Verlag, 1995.

26 Oct 1999 19:51 John Hughes