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

On Mar 17, 2021, at 2:35 PM, Richard Eisenberg wrote:

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.

I strongly agree. Tracking down the evolving proposals, is rather a chore... -- Viktor.