-flavours of Linux and BSD, and in InstallShield form for Windows
-folks. Binary builds for other platforms are available as a .tar.gz
-which can be installed wherever you want. The source distribution is
-also available from the same place.
-
-Once you have the distribution, please follow the pointers in the
-README file to find all of the documentation about this release.
-
-
-More details about what's new
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
-
-5.02 incorporates many small refinements and bug fixes over the previous
-stable release (5.00.2). There are no major language changes.
-
- - Implements Haskell 98 (revised)
-
- - Ability to emit External Core. (But GhC can't read External Core
- back in. Yet.)
-
- - Much improved support for Windows platforms. Binary builds are
- now entirely freestanding. There's no need to install Cygwin or
- Mingwin to use it. It's a one-click-install-and-off-you-go story now.
-
- - Several small changes to bring GHC into line with the newest Haskell 98
- report.
-
- - GHCi (the interactive system) now works on Windows.
-
- - Partial FFI support in GHCi. At the moment, foreign import (both
- static and dynamic) is supported on x86 and sparc platforms.
-
- - A compacting garbage collector, to try and reduce space use.
-
- - Ability to disconnect built-in numeric syntax from the supplied
- Prelude. This allows you to define your own arithmetic packages,
- which Haskell98 doesn't quite support.
-
- - Experimental: partial support for hierarchical module names.
-
- - Experimental: following heroic hacking by Ken Shan, 5.02 now
- works on Alpha (Tru64 only). Many 64-bit bugs have been shaken
- out. At the moment only the batch-mode compiler works -- no GHCi
- or native code generator yet.
-
-We've found and fixed more bugs than you could possibly imagine. A
-big thank-you to all those who reported bugs in the 5.00.X series. We
-claim to have fixed almost all reported bugs. In general we've spent
-a large amount of effort trying to improve the stability of the
-system relative to 5.00.X. (Famous last words ...)
-
-For full details see the release notes:
-
- http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/5.02/set/release-5-02.html