Known bugs and infelicities

The Glasgow Haskell Compiler User's Guide, Version 5.04
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# Chapter 12. Known bugs and infelicities

# 12.1. Haskell 98 vs. Glasgow Haskell: language non-compliance

This section lists Glasgow Haskell infelicities in its implementation of Haskell 98. See also the “when things go wrong” section (Chapter 9) for information about crashes, space leaks, and other undesirable phenomena.

The limitations here are listed in Haskell Report order (roughly).

## 12.1.1. Divergence from Haskell 98

### 12.1.1.1. Lexical syntax

- The Haskell report specifies that programs may be written using Unicode. GHC only accepts the ISO-8859-1 character set at the moment.

- Certain lexical rules regarding qualified identifiers are slightly different in GHC compared to the Haskell report. When you have `module``.``reservedop`, such as `M.\`, GHC will interpret it as a single qualified operator rather than the two lexemes `M` and `.\`.

- When `-fglasgow-exts` is on, GHC reserves several keywords beginning with two underscores. This is due to the fact that GHC uses the same lexical analyser for interface file parsing as it does for source file parsing, and these keywords are used in interface files. Do not use any identifiers beginning with a double underscore in `-fglasgow-exts` mode.

### 12.1.1.2. Context-free syntax

- GHC doesn't do fixity resolution in expressions during parsing. For example, according to the Haskell report, the following expression is legal Haskell:

          let x = 42 in x == 42 == True

  and parses as:

          (let x = 42 in x == 42) == True

  because according to the report, the `let` expression "extends as far to the right as possible". Since it can't extend past the second equals sign without causing a parse error (`==` is non-fix), the `let`-expression must terminate there. GHC simply gobbles up the whole expression, parsing like this:

          (let x = 42 in x == 42 == True)

  The Haskell report is arguably wrong here, but nevertheless it's a difference between GHC & Haskell 98.

### 12.1.1.3. Expressions and patterns

Very long `String` constants:

  May not go through. If you add a “string gap” every few thousand characters, then the strings can be as long as you like.

  Bear in mind that string gaps and the `-cpp` option don't mix very well (see Section 4.12.3).

### 12.1.1.4. Declarations and bindings

None known.

### 12.1.1.5. Module system and interface files

Namespace pollution

  Several modules internal to GHC are visible in the standard namespace. All of these modules begin with `Prel`, so the rule is: don't use any modules beginning with `Prel` in your program, or you may be comprehensively screwed.

### 12.1.1.6. Numbers, basic types, and built-in classes

Multiply-defined array elements—not checked:

  This code fragment should elicit a fatal error, but it does not:

      main = print (array (1,1) [(1,2), (1,3)])

### 12.1.1.7. In Prelude support

The `Char` type

  The Haskell report says that the `Char` type holds 16 bits. GHC follows the ISO-10646 standard a little more closely: `maxBound :: Char` in GHC is `0x10FFFF`.

Arbitrary-sized tuples:

  Tuples are currently limited to size 61. HOWEVER: standard instances for tuples (`Eq`, `Ord`, `Bounded`, `Ix` `Read`, and `Show`) are available only up to 5-tuples.

  This limitation is easily subvertible, so please ask if you get stuck on it.

## 12.1.2. GHC's interpretation of undefined behaviour in Haskell 98

This section documents GHC's take on various issues that are left undefined or implementation specific in Haskell 98.

Sized integral types

  In GHC the `Int` type follows the size of an address on the host architecture; in other words it holds 32 bits on a 32-bit machine, and 64-bits on a 64-bit machine.

  Arithmetic on `Int` is unchecked for overflow, so all operations on `Int` happen modulo 2`n` where `n` is the size in bits of the `Int` type.

  The `fromInteger`function (and hence also `fromIntegral`) is a special case when converting to `Int`. The value of `fromIntegral x :: Int` is given by taking the lower `n` bits of `(abs x)`, multiplied by the sign of `x` (in 2's complement `n`-bit arithmetic). This behaviour was chosen so that for example writing `0xffffffff :: Int` preserves the bit-pattern in the resulting `Int`.

  Negative literals, such as `-3`, are specified by (a careful reading of) the Haskell Report as meaning `Prelude.negate (Prelude.fromInteger 3)`. So `-2147483648` means `negate (fromInteger 2147483648)`. Since `fromInteger` takes the lower 32 bits of the representation, `fromInteger (2147483648::Integer)`, computed at type `Int` is `-2147483648::Int`. The `negate` operation then overflows, but it is unchecked, so `negate (-2147483648::Int)` is just `-2147483648`. In short, one can write `minBound::Int` as a literal with the expected meaning (but that is not in general guaranteed.

  The `fromIntegral` function also preserves bit-patterns when converting between the sized integral types (`Int8`, `Int16`, `Int32`, `Int64` and the unsigned `Word` variants), see the modules `Data.Int` and `Data.Word` in the library documentation.

Unchecked float arithmetic

  Operations on `Float` and `Double` numbers are unchecked for overflow, underflow, and other sad occurrences. (note, however that some architectures trap floating-point overflow and loss-of-precision and report a floating-point exception, probably terminating the program).

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