[oggy]

> Haskell -- like other pure FP languages -- is built around > the approximation of denotational semantics,

Interesting, do you have any references for this? I thought that the primary reason for purity was to enable equational reasoning, but I have no sources for this. Also, AFAIK, there are no formal semantics for Haskell?

[pron]

I think the first few chapters here explain this nicely: http://www.paultaylor.eu/~pt/stable/prot.pdf

Don't know about a formal spec. I'm not a Haskell developer.