On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 6:44 AM, Alexey Khudyakov
On 31 August 2016 at 12:10, Henning Thielemann wrote:
Sometimes I hope that availability of portable libraries would help non-mainstream compilers to gain ground.
Compiler that doesn't support bang patterns (and half of GHC extensions) cannot gain ground.
Bang patterns (i.e., the kind we are using which are always top-level, not intermixed with patterns) are an extremely simple extension. Every time someone says "it's so easy to avoid BangPatterns, you can just..."— well, yes: it's so easy, alternative compilers can do exactly what you suggest in order to implement BangPatterns. The whole point of BangPatterns is not to increase expressivity of Haskell, it's to clean up code by saying what you mean. In Haskell we value saying what we mean, and avoiding exposing implementation-detail cruftiness; and this is simply another example of that. By avoiding CPP hackery we (a) make the containers code much cleaner and easier to read, (b) avoid needing to worry about CPP possibly doing unexpected things, and (c) avoid needing to worry about whether our tests actually test what we mean (since using CPP means doing variational programming, so we don't necessarily run the variant of the code we think we are). -- Live well, ~wren