On Apr 22, 2009, at 11:30 PM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
so any decision on what features to exclude from future versions of Haskell must necessarily look at publicly accessible source code.
Wrong. There is no "necessarily" about it. People made decisions about what to deprecate in the Fortran and COBOL standards without looking at publicly accessible source code.
I'm talking about the only rational way to do it. It's irrational for language maintainers to remove features that are widely used in publicly available source code, as such changes are detrimental to the success of the language. Thus, rational language maintainers will decide what features to exclude from future versions of Haskell by looking at publicly accessible source code.
And the decision to remove n+k patterns from Haskell', wrong though I think it was, was NOT made on a nose-counting basis. Or if it was, there is not the slightest evidence of it in http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/RemoveNPlusK
Numerous people have contributed to that discussion, and the consensus is that too few people are using them to justify the feature. Indeed, in this very discussion, you are the only one advocating them. What does that tell you?
It's also a straw man argument. Nobody says that. I certainly don't. What I DO say is that - MY code contains n+k
Why should this matter? The contents of your code are not relevant to the future of Haskell. n = 1 is meaningless.
Is there a simple way to download everything from Hackage?
One would need to write a script to do this. Regards, John A. De Goes N-BRAIN, Inc. The Evolution of Collaboration http://www.n-brain.net | 877-376-2724 x 101