On 15 July 2005 11:24, Henning Thielemann wrote:

On Fri, 15 Jul 2005, Simon Marlow wrote:

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On 15 July 2005 09:48, Henning Thielemann wrote:

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The limit in Haskell is that most compilers don't conform to the Haskell 98 report which allows mutually recursive modules. But I think the compilers should allow them instead of forcing users to put many type and class definitions into one module.

I hope you weren't including GHC in "most compilers" :-) GHC's implementation of mutually recursive modules is conformant with Haskell 98 (see Section 5.7).

But there are unresolved problems with class definitions. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2005-May/009873.html

Is this covered by the statement "Modules may be mutually recursive."? http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/modules.html

Ok, mututal recursion between classes in separate modules isn't currently supported (I'd forgotten about that). But it's a bit harsh to say that because of this missing feature GHC doesn't support mutually recursive modules - we've been using mutually recursive modules in GHC itself for nearly a decade! Cheers, Simon