Il giorno 30/nov/2014, alle ore 15:59, Roman Cheplyaka
The language («GHC Haskell») is evolving quite rapidly, it's just no-one is really interested in maintaining the standard anymore.
I don't think it should disappoint you, unless you're a language researcher or compiler writer.
Hi. I’m a newcomer to the Haskell world, coming from C++ where the standard and conformity to the standard is of great value. Given the tendency of commercial implementors to deviate with custom and often bad-designed features, having an international standard that has to be followed by anyone is a great thing (and implementors are unfortunately very good at deviating anyway). At first, the existence of the Haskell standard gave me a good impression. Haskell is not like other languages like python or Java that, at the end, have the One True Implementation. Haskell has born from the community, and there always have been a multiplicity of implementations. In this context, having a common standard to implement makes sense, to aid compatibility. But Haskell is not like C++ neither. Haskell implementations are not driven by big corps, and features that deviates from the “standard” are not designed and implemented by marketing departments, but they are instead often the implementation of new and innovative ideas from the research world. For this reason, it’s not so useful to crystallize the language to some-years-old standard when the compilers implementors, users and researchers are so good at evolving the language in a coherent way. Here, I think, the point is the community: the language can continue to grow and evolve in the presence of multiple implementations by ensuring collaborations between the communities of the different compilers. If this continues to be done, I don’t think a formal standard, released every x years, is needed. What, I think, needs to be improved, instead, is the way the community handles the evolving of the libraries used in the haskell world, but I know that’s a whole other story. Best Regards, Nicola