Niklas Larsson
Hi!
Why not follow the standard in that pragmas were intended for all tools consuming Haskell ...
That much isn't clear to me. The Report defines the syntax very specifically to be for "compiler pragmas" to be used by "compiler implementations". I personally consider "the compiler" to be something different from tools like HLint. Of course, on the other hand it also specified that implementations should ignore unknown pragmas, so the original authors clearly didn't anticipate that non-compiler tooling would be so common.
... and not for GHCs exclusive use? All that would require is to make the warning opt-in.
Disabling the unknown pragma warning by default would mean that users not be warned if they mis-spelled LANGAGE or INILNE, which could result in frustrating error messages for the uninitiated. It seems to me that we should try to avoid this given just how common these pragmas are in practice. Finally, in general I think it would be generally useful to have a properly namespaced syntax for tooling pragmas. Afterall, we otherwise end up with tools claiming random bits of syntax, resulting in an unnecessarily steep learning curve and potentially syntactically-colliding tools. Cheers, - Ben