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That's neat; parser working hard to make the language look simple.

The success sword of GHC is dual edged; it's made Haskell effectively synonymous with "Language accepted by a recent GHC". The upside is an amazing language with great many advanced features. The downside is an enormous language in a monoculture. It's nearly the antithesis of C (small language that grew little and slowly, but for which there are 100s of implementations).

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Haskell 98 is a very simple language.

Modern GHC Haskell is to Haskell 98 as C++ is to C.

It's funny, you could also say this of Ruby and MRI, which is in so many other respects the polar opposite of Haskell.

Edit: Spelling.

I don't know either, but FWIW, there _are_ many (ok, several) Haskell implementation, but they only implement the language defined in the standard, and nobody has been able or willing to chase all the extensions in GHC.

Does Ruby and MRI have specs detailed enough that you could implement the entired language from just those? Few languages do, but Scheme and Haskell are among them.

Ruby is actually an ISO standard. Admittedly, it's frozen at Ruby 1.8 and it doesn't count for much.

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