>> Well that's easy - it wasn't so huge back then! ;-)
> 
> Even if that was the case, hand compiling Haskell to assembly (or more probably,
> C) is nuts.  Haskell semantics is a long way off from assembly/C semantics.
> More likely they first wrote the compiler in C and then went on to rewrite in
> Haskell...

Ah. Miranda.

There used to be a proprietry programming language called Miranda. 
Actually, there used to be a whole zoo of programming languages similar 
to Haskell, but all slightly different. Haskell was explicitly created 
to end this situation, so that there would be One Ring to Rule them All...

I imagine they wrote a (comparitively trivial) program to transform 
Haskell to Miranda (the difference is almost entirely syntax) and used 
Miranda's existing compiler.

Now, to find out how they bootstrapped Miranda you'd have to ask the 
guys to designed it. ;-)

Note that while *compiling* Haskell is hard, *interpretting* it is 
fairly easy [if you don't care about performance].

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