Re: [Haskell-cafe] Policy for taking over a package on Hackage

2011/5/25 Ivan Lazar Miljenovic :

On 25 May 2011 22:17, Stephen Tetley wrote:

...

Hi Ivan

Forks are good, no?

The Parsec experience has suggested to me at least, that new author's "capping" another author's work by bumping up to a major version, causes a significant difficulties even when the original author has gone.

As for wl-pprint, it was a very tidy library in its original implementation - it's a pity it now has name clashes with Applicative. My feeling is that a new library in a new namespace with some attention to new combinator names would be better.

Such as?  I'm _hopeless_ at making up names... ;-)

Having a new package would require a new name and new module namespace, let alone thinking up new names for combinators...

Also, by clashes with Applicative, are you referring to empty and <$> ?  I'm not sure if a better name than "empty" can be found; as for <$>, maybe using pretty's notation of $$ and $+$ rather than <$> and <$$> ?

What about 'emptyDoc'? Moreover, if you are changing the names of combinators, then moving them away from Applicative and Arrow would be a good idea; i.e., don't use <+>, as it already used by ArrowPlus. Moreover, if you can make a Monoid instance such that `mappend` equals <>, you would also make the library compatible to a future introduction of (<>) = mappend. best regards, Simon