The Hugs 98 User Manual
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2  A technical summary of Hugs 98

Hugs 98 provides an almost complete implementation of Haskell 98 [Haskell98], including:

Hugs 98 also supports a number of advanced and experimental extensions including multi-parameter classes, extensible records, rank-2 polymorphism, existentials, scoped type variables, and restricted type synonyms. By default, these features can only be used if Hugs is started with the -98 command line flag. (See Section 7 for details.)

Hugs is implemented as an interpreter that provides:

Hugs is a successor to Gofer --- an experimental functional programming system that was first released in September 1991 --- and users of Gofer will see much that is familiar in Hugs. However, Hugs offers much greater compatibility with the Haskell standard; indeed, the name Hugs was originally chosen as a mnemonic for the "Haskell users' Gofer system."

There have been many modifications and enhancements to Hugs since its first release on Valentines day, February 14, in 1995. Some of the most obvious improvements include:

There have also been a number of other enhancements, and fixes for bugs in previous releases.


The Hugs 98 User Manual
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May 22, 1999