>> Heh. Or do you look that up from the spec sheet of the guys selling 
>> you the metal? ;-)
> 
> Well there are standard steel and aluminium alloys that have well 
> documented properties, when a supplier sells you one of these types you 
> know what you are getting, and if it's not within the official standard 
> then you can get your money back etc.

Ah, I see.

>> Sure. I'm thinking about when the part is in normal use.
> 
> Ah I see, you mean if a part is designed to have some force applied 
> during normal use, like a door handle or a key or something.  Well yes, 
> obviously then you figure out what is the maximum force likely to be 
> applied during normal use and simulate/test that it will not break under 
> that load.

If you're making something like an LCD mounting bracket, do you actually 
do a detailed simulation for that component? Or do you just do "OK, well 
we're using 0.3 mm steel for the rest of the frame, so let's use 0.3 mm 
steel"? (And change it if it turns out to be too weak...)

>> Anyway, you need *something* that can compile Haskell source code. 
>> This is the "stage-0" compiler.
> 
> But who wrote the stage 0 compiler?  Was it written in machine code?

As I say, the "original" GHC was written in ML. (I have no idea what the 
ML interpretter was written in...) These days, the stage-0 compiler will 
just be an older version of GHC which is already compiled.

The fun thing is if you want to ran GHC on an unsupported platform. This 
apparently involves asking GHC to compile itself into ANSI C, and then 
using a suitable C compiler for the target platform to produce a working 
binary. Apparently some nutter used this to get GHC to work on a mobile 
phone powered by an ARM CPU or something random like that...

Aside from GHC, there are a few other Haskell compilers. AFAIK, Hugs is 
written in plain C. NHC98, YHC, JHC, LHC and EHC/UHC are all written in 
Haskell. Most of these are "experimental" compilers that can't be used 
for production use. Only GHC is really "production-ready", and hence 
when people say "Haskell compiler" they almost always mean GHC.

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