Question

I am an absolute beginner to haskell but I want to dive into the world of functional programming.

Now my first problem already happened during installation (on ubuntu natty 64 bit).

I installed ghc6 from the repository as well as hmake which brings hi as an interactive shell. I installed nothing more.

But when I start hi, it only says that it cannot find the prelude.

What else do I need to install or how do I configure hi (hmake) to find the prelude.

EDIT: Here some more info of what I installed:

Package: ghc6                            
State: installed
Automatically installed: no
Version: 6.12.3-1ubuntu7

Package: hmake                           
State: installed
Automatically installed: no
Version: 3.14-2ubuntu1

Answer 1

You might be better off installing the Haskell Platform:

http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/

The latest version uses GHC 7.0.3.

It looks like you would have to do it manually though, instead of via your package manager. It’s a pain that the version most Linux distros have in their repositories is typically quite a way behind the latest release.

---

To answer your specific question, I’d be surprised if Ubuntu had packaged the Prelude separately from the core of GHC. It was my understanding that the Prelude and GHC were quite strongly linked for performance reasons.I’ve looked here:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/natty/haskell-platform

but I can’t see any package that contains ‘Prelude’ in the name.