RE: [Haskell-cafe] Re: ANNOUNCE: Utrecht Haskell Compiler (UHC) --first release

Jon Fairbairn wrote:

"John A. De Goes" writes:

...

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.

There has to be a bit of give and take here between standards and implementations. The Haskell 98 standard is now very old and becoming increasingly less relevant, hence the Haskell' effort. (n+k) patterns were always controversial and the decision to include them has indeed been reversed by the Haskell' committee. So I would say that {Haskell 98 - (n+k)} is itself a worthwhile standard to implement. UHC is clear that this is what it has implemented, so it's not as if they are misrepresenting themselves. Ganesh =============================================================================== Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic communications disclaimer: http://www.credit-suisse.com/legal/en/disclaimer_email_ib.html ===============================================================================