On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Claus Reinke
joking and bikeshedding aside:
- Haskell'98 is a fixed standard. Haskell'98 (revised) is a revised version of the same standard. The discussion on what is in either is over. Unless someone wants to start and edit a new revision of Haskell'98. Or someone wants to write about experience with and criticism of the existing standards. None of which seems to relate to this thread's subject, though either would fit into other threads on this mailing list.
- the UHC announcement states (emphasis added): "UHC supports _almost all_ Haskell98 features plus many experimental extensions". Once they start claiming to have a full Haskell'98 implementation, everybody can start filing bug reports. Actually, you can start doing that now as they explicitly relate UHC to Haskell'98, not Haskell, not Haskell'. But once you've filed a bug report about a deviation from the version of the standard being referred to, it is up to them.
- there are one or two more interesting things to discuss about UHC. That would require some actual work to find out more about it.
- implementing a Haskell compiler requires a lot of work. So does detailing language extensions, to say nothing about providing supporting evidence for suggested language extensions by actually implementing them side-by-side with Haskell's other features. - anyone who gets through the work of implementing something, let alone a Haskell compiler, to the stage of releasing/announcing it, is likely looking forward to getting feedback on their work.
In reality, the only feedback most projects get is from bug reports (and not always those), web access logs, and rumours on blogs or irc. One really, really, does not need one's project name to be used for other unrelated entertainment as well.
May I respectfully suggest that further postings under _this_ subject give something back to the UHC implementers, in the form of investing some actual work and time to find out about the fruits of their work?
Claus
I'd like to second this email. I found the ehc/uhc project very interesting when I was looking at it a year or two ago, and I'm a little distressed that this thread has been so unproductive and basically hostile. I was hoping that comments would be more substantive, rather than carping about what a maintainer plans on adding (and thereby triggering an apparent holy war). For example, I expected someone to ask why it was not cabalized since that would help distribution; to which a developer could respond that it could well be except source files need to be preprocessed with the grammar-conversion tool (UUAGC?) and Cabal doesn't support that like it does alex/happy; to which someone might propose a hack-around using GHC's -Fgetc. option, or maybe someone would go quickly add support to Cabal and we could get started on Cabalizing the various compilers - Er. Not to try to force the discussion in any particular direction or anything... -- gwern