[Haskell-cafe] questions about core

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| I am trying to get a deeper understanding of core's role in GHC and
| the compilation of functional languages in general.  So far I have

You can find lots of stuff here
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary.  At the bottom is a link to a lot of GHC-related papers.

|   - Exactly what are the operational and denotational semantics of core?

It'd be good to have a canonical place where this was written down, I agree; but it's totally straightforward.  (The operational semantics, at least.)  As Kirsten says, the FC paper is the most up to date presentation.

|   - The headline reasons (and any other arguments that emerge) for
| having core *and* stg as separate definitions.

You can find a description of STG, which describes the differences from Core, in the Commentary
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/Compiler/StgSynType

 There is a lot of stuff in the Commentary!

Simon