+++ Don Stewart [Aug 03 09 22:53 ]:
alexander.dunlap:
o pandoc — markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, Docbook, OpenDocument, ODT, RTF, MediaWiki, groff
No. Pandoc is too actively developed to go into the HP. It's also much more of an end-user application than a "standard library" - it's applications are not general enough to be included in the standard distribution.
One comment on your thoughtful post.
What role does having unique capabilities for the Haskell Platform play?
Our base library is already notable for having OpenGL support out of the box. Maybe markup/markdown formats (for example) would also help Haskell stand out from the crowd. A similar case would be gtk2hs out of the box (Python supplied Tcl guis).
On the other hand, maybe the HP should be aiming to be comprehensive enough to /support/ pandoc without additional dependencies.
I agree that pandoc shouldn't be in the HP. Also, although we ought to have a zip encoding package, I'm not sure it should be zip-archive (I'm the author). zip-archive is not complete; there are some kinds of zip files it can't parse. Quoting the documentation: "there is no support for encryption, zip files that span multiple disks, ZIP64, OS-specific file attributes, or compression methods other than Deflate." A better solution, perhaps, would be a binding to libzip. In this connection, I want to make a general point about the HP: In a way, it doesn't matter so much which additional pure Haskell libraries it includes, because once you have cabal install, you can get anything easily. For bindings to C libraries, it's another story. pcre-light is a good example. If I want to tell someone how to install pandoc with syntax highlighting, I can't just say, "Get the HP and then cabal install pandoc -fhighlighting". I have to say: "First, install the pcre library, if it's not already on your system..." -- and you lose a lot of users at this step. Havig high-quality, high-level bindings to standard libraries like pcre, libzip, etc., together with the C libraries themselves, in HP would be very useful. John