About HUGS

HUGS is an interpreter for the Haskell language. It is purely functional, and conforms to the Haskell 98 standard. HUGS was initially derived from an earlier dialect of Haskell called Gofer. As such, HUGS stands for Haskell User's Gofer System.

From the HUGS documentation:

``Hugs is best used as a Haskell program development system: it boasts extremely fast compilation, supports incremental compilation, and has the convenience of an interactive interpreter (within which one can move from module to module to test different portions of a program). However, being an interpreter, it does not nearly match the run-time performance of, for example, GHC or HBC.''