Installing GHC on OSX

During my quest to better understand Functors & Monads, it was suggested that I take a detour and learn Haskell first, as I was struggling a bit with Scala's type annotations. So, off to MacPorts I went:

  ~> sudo port install ghc
  --->  Fetching ghc
  --->  Verifying checksum(s) for ghc
  --->  Extracting ghc
  --->  Applying patches to ghc
  --->  Configuring ghc
  --->  Building ghc with target all

Half an hour later, I was still waiting for it to build. Something was not quite right. I killed the process and tried again (after issuing a sudo port clean ghc, because it seemed to be in an inconsistent state after killing it).

Same problem - it got up to building, then seemed to hang. Looking at top, I could see ghc-6.8.2 running intermittently. After a while, ghc-6.8.3 was also added to the list of processes (running intermittently), but still no progress on the build.

I gave it about 45 minutes before killing it again. Brad has been down this path before, and he put me on to the pre-packaged installer available from the http://haskell.org/ghc download page. As per the instructions, I installed XCode off the Leopard disc, then ran the installer, and hey presto, I was ghc hello_world.hs'ing it up!