On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 03:47, Mikhail Vorozhtsov <mikhail.vorozhtsov@gmail.com> wrote:
On 01/18/2012 01:52 AM, Brandon Allbery wrote:
On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 06:29, Mikhail Vorozhtsov
<mikhail.vorozhtsov@gmail.com <mailto:mikhail.vorozhtsov@gmail.com>> wrote:
   I wouldn't be too optimistic about convincing GHC HQ. Even making
   Applicative a superclass of Monad can make Haskell98 nazis come
   after you in ninja suits.

What?!  The only significant complaint I've seen here is that the
necessary language support for doing so without breaking more or less
every Haskell program currently in existence is difficult to achieve.
This is a /big/ exaggeration. What libraries exactly are going to be broken?

One of the big reasons the Haskell Platform release got delayed for so long is a similar breaking change (making the haskell98 package incompatible with base), which left a bunch of required libraries unable to build; it took quite a while for all of them to get updated.  I expect the same thing to happen with the Functor, Applicative => Monad change.

--
brandon s allbery                                      allbery.b@gmail.com
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