On May 17, 2009, at 02:32 , Vasili I. Galchin wrote:
I am confused between Haskell as delineated in the Haskell Report VS ghc "pragmas" which extend Haskell beyond the Haskell Report. I am sure I am not the first to ask. Caveat: on my part, I am not against innovation/extensions, but I don't like to see language "bloat". This is not a negative/pegorative statement .... just a challenging one.
Remember that Haskell is *also* a research language; this means it regularly gets new features intended to allow research into various type system extensions. Some of these "stick" (the original type classes, and later multiple parameter type classes), some flop (linear implicit parameters), some hang around for a while before being replaced by something (hopefully) better (functional dependencies vs. type families).