Re: [Haskell-cafe] Playing with ATs again

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 11:55 PM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

On 5 August 2010 16:48, Gregory Crosswhite wrote:

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 On 8/4/10 11:40 PM, Andrew Coppin wrote:

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Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

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Don't forget, GHC is open source: if this lack really was "dumb" and annoying you, there was nothing stopping you from rectifying this situation up until now.

Except that, in the real world, this is actually completely infeasible. Yes, I know it's the basic tenant of OSS that you can modify the program to do whatever you want. But in reality, something like GHC is far too large and complex for this to be a realistic possibility. And this holds for most other nontrivial software too.

Fair enough, but if one can't do better one's self then one should be careful about calling the work of others "dumb", which was the original point.

Exactly.  Either do it yourself or be grateful that someone has done _something_, even if it isn't as good as you like.  It's not like you're paying for it...

My bad, no offense was meant, and perhaps I should choose my words better. I've read Manuel's papers and worked with Simon, and they're both very smart people. I wasn't commenting at all on the quality of their implementation, but rather trying to make the point that it's really a bug that it doesn't work, and, AFAIK, a bug that is going to be fixed. I think everyone can relate to the frustration that occurs when you are surprised by a feature being missing. I actually think it's a testament to the quality of GHC that things "just work" so often that I can be so surprised when they don't. -- ryan