Guide to Core/STG syntax?

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| I'm trying to come to grips with GHC, and one thing that I=20
| think would help would be a nice guide to the Core and STG=20
| syntaxes.  There is an old guide to Core syntax in the user=20
| guide (section 4.17.3) but that section remains unchanged=20
| from at least version 0.29 of the compiler, and is looking=20
| rather out of date.

Indeed that would be nice.   The best there is is Andrew Tolmach's
external-core representation, which is described rather thoroughly
in=20
	http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/papers/core.ps.gz

The various -ddump outputs are not well documented, and
change reguarly anyway.  It's easier to agree that documentation
would be useful than to generate such documentation.

Let me make a constructive suggestion, though.  Often people
learn stuff about GHC.  There's an easy way for them to record
what they learned, by putting it in Manuel's GHC commentary:
	http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/ghc/comm/

Notes in the commentary don't need to be complete or
consistent -- but if you simply jot down (in HTML) the things
you wish you had known to start with, your jottings can easily=20
be incorporated and help the next person.

So send us your jottings!  (For those with access to the CVS
repository, it's in=20
	fptools/ghc/docs/comm/


Simon