"John A. De Goes"
That's absurd. You have no way to access private source code, so any decision on what features to exclude from future versions of Haskell must necessarily look at publicly accessible source code.
This is all entirely beside the point. The question is not whether n+k patterns should be in the language, it's whether an implementation of Haskell 98 should include them.
The only alternative is to continuously add, and never remove, features from Haskell, even if no one (that we know) uses them.
But we can remove them in future language versions. The point I was trying to make at the beginning of this subthread was that implementations should follow the definition, because having a core language (Haskell 98) that can be relied on is simpler and wastes less time than the alternative. -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk http://www.chaos.org.uk/~jf/Stuff-I-dont-want.html (updated 2009-01-31)