-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 1/20/11 21:12 , Ian Lynagh wrote:
On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 09:22:37PM +0100, Axel Simon wrote:
I therefore think that keeping the number of extensions to a minimum should be a high priority. It seems that the ghc team is going overboard with the amount of extensions and their granularity that I do not believe that there will ever be another compiler since implementing all these extensions is a nightmare. The road of may extensions is leading down the road that the Haskell standards aimed to avoid: having a single implementation defining what a Haskell program can be.
I'm not sure if you're saying there should be fewer new language features implemented, less fine-grained control over which are enabled, or something else?
"Many of the new features ought to be changes to the standard, not individual language features that might or might not be implemented by various compilers." Less fine-grained control could be taken as a subset of this; consider that Haskell2010 can be understood as Haskell98 + a number of language extensions (or de-extensions in the case of n+k). I think he has a good point: having too many individual language features significantly raises the bar for what other compilers need to at least consider supporting. Even if we don't necessarily change the official standard, perhaps there should be standard packages of extensions which compilers are encouraged to support even if they don't support fine-grained extension control. - -- brandon s. allbery [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk05BEcACgkQIn7hlCsL25VBnwCfT9nCZ5eLs4oJ3jUFHf3Tl8o1 7DwAnicvaNk6XuT0H1pZbaotzjKGoP+/ =vqzt -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----