I won't bother to look it up, since it's not important and we probably agree on basically everything, but there were in my memory quite a few tempests in teapots about this sort of thing. It wasn't that there were other working compilers the overt ghc-centrism was dissing; the dispute was more about the desirability of distinguishing the Haskell language from the ghc implementation which pained some. No one doubted that the ghc was the going one, especially once hugs became unmaintained. Among the arguments for overt ghc-centrism were ... that it was confusing to users not to make it obvious that effectively Haskell=ghc. Similarly it was confusing to users ... that there was not something more like a system of standard libraries like those 'blessed' by the Platform. "For commercial adoption we need a clear path through all this stuff, we need clarification, blessing and decision" was one view. I remember people who were disturbed that some Haskell platform pages had you clicking an icon reading "Download Haskell" - meaning the ghc+ Haskell platform. I'd have to hunt for an example but see
http://code.galois.com/darcs/haskell-platform/download-websi... for something not quite like that. For someone like dons the fastidiousness that would balk at a "Download Haskell" icon that meant "download ghc+blessed libraries" was ridiculous (rightly, I think, for the time). (Maybe they thought it should yield a pdf of the Haskell Report ...) There were actually quite a few similarities in the arguments, the difference was that no one poisoned the wells in their favor of their side by making up imaginary corrupt commercial motives. The difference was between people with a certain view of how industrial adoption was to be advanced, and a different more language-centric view. There is on reflection quite a bit of similarity between dons and Snoyman