John Goerzen wrote:
There was a brief discussion on #haskell today about the Haskell standard. I'd like to get opinions from more people, and ask if there is any effort being done in this direction presently.
I think an updated standard is overdue. I find it difficult anymore to write any but the most trivial of programs using pure Haskell 98.
[snip] This is perhaps a minor point, but if a serious new standardization effort were to emerge, I would like to see the formal semantics of Haskell firmed up a little. The Haskell 98 report does a pretty good job, but it fails to specify an explicit abstract term language for the Haskell kernel, and doesn't (in my opinion) do a satisfactory job of supplying formal semantics for the IO monad (this one's tough; perhaps via a transform to the pi-calculus?). It obviously doesn't even touch the semantics of extensions like implicit parameters, multi-parameter typeclasses (straightforward, but...), existential types or the STM monad. A serious effort in this area might allow practical interoperability between pluggable Haskell frontends (parsing, typechecking, desugaring, template expansion) and backends (optimization, code gen, linking) which interface via something that looks a lot like external core, as well as making Haskell more amenable to formal verification. Robert Dockins