Re: Is referring to GHC-proposals in GHC user manual bad practice or not?

17 Mar 2021

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On Mar 17, 2021, at 2:52 PM, Oleg Grenrus  wrote:
Do we agree on this interpretation?
Yes, fully. Thanks for illustrating with examples.

Richard
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- Oleg
On 17.3.2021 20.35, Richard Eisenberg wrote:
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My vote is that the manual should be self-standing. References to proposals are good, but as supplementary/background reading only. My gold standard always is: if we lost all the source code to GHC and all its compiled versions, but just had the manual and Haskell Reports (but without external references), we could re-create an interface-equivalent implementation. (I say "interface-equivalent" because we do not specify all the details of e.g. optimizations and interface files.) We are very, very far from that gold standard. Yet I still think it's a good standard to aim for when drafting new sections of the manual.
Of course, authors are quite free to copy-and-paste from proposal text to form a new manual chapter.
If we agree about this, it would be good to lay this out somewhere, perhaps in the "care and feeding" chapter.
Richard
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On Mar 17, 2021, at 1:21 PM, Oleg Grenrus  wrote:
I forgot to link a bit of relevant discussion from
https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/406,
is there a (silent) consensus on the issue?
- Oleg
On 17.3.2021 19.15, Oleg Grenrus wrote:
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I have a following question:
My lexer rules related proposal was recently accepted. The biggest part
of getting it in is writing documentation for it. While looking at
Divergence from Haskell 98 and Haskell 2010 section of the user manual,
in particular Lexical syntax, it already has See "GHC Proposal #229 for
the precise rules.".
Can I just the same? (I think there was an implicit acceptance of that
practice in e.g.
https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/merge_requests/1664#note_238759)
However, I think that referring to proposals text for "essential" bits
of information is a bad practice.
Because GHC proposals are sometimes amended, one have to look into
GitHub history to find out what were there for a particular time point
of a GHC release. Very laborous.
---
Currently there is 23 references to about a dozen of proposals. An
example are passages like
In 9.0, the behavior of this extension changed, and now we require
that a negative literal must not be preceded by a closing token (see
   `GHC Proposal #229
https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0229-wh...`__
   for the definition of a closing token).
or
a future release will be
    turned off by default and then possibly removed. The reasons for
this and
    the deprecation schedule are described in `GHC proposal #30
https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0030-re...`__.
And there are better examples, which are references for more information,
not essential one, like
See the proposal `DuplicateRecordFields without ambiguous field access
https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0366-no...`_
    and the documentation on :extension:`DuplicateRecordFields` for
further details.
(I'd put the internal user manual link first), or
But these automatic eta-expansions may silently change the semantics
of the user's program,
   and deep skolemisation was removed from the language by
   `GHC Proposal #287
https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0287-si...`__.
   This proposal has many more examples.
---
So to boil down my question, can I write
Lexical syntax of identifiers and decimal numbers differs slightly
from the Haskell report.
   See GHC Proposal #403 for the precise rules and differences.
- Oleg
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