| I think an updated standard is overdue. I find it difficult anymore to | write any but the most trivial of programs using pure Haskell 98. Some | notable, and widely-used, features developed since then include: | | * Overlapping instances | * FFI | * Hierarchical namespace | * Undecidable instances | * All sorts of updates to the standard library In fact there's a well established way to express the results of such an exercise: an Addendum to the Report. Two of the things you mention here already are Addenda http://haskell.org/definition/ namely FFI and hierarchical namespaces. [Actually, for the latter, the Addendum seems to be stuck at 0.0, and doesn't have any names attached to it. So it's in a kind of limbo, but there's a draft at least.] These Addenda are useful for exactly the reasons you describe: to solidify and nail down the details of particular language extensions. How do Addenda get written? The Haskell community is a particularly informal one. There is no Haskell committee. Instead, someone gets up sufficient motivation to gather a bunch of people and write a document. It's a good idea to publish regular drafts, and ensure that any one interested can see and contribute, because ultimately the usefulness of the Addendum depends on its acceptance. In short, the way lies open. The only bottleneck is people willing to do the work. I think that many of the people who produced the existing Haskell Report feel that they've done their bit, and perhaps someone else can have a go. That's certainly what I feel -- doing the Haskell 98 book was a *lot* of work -- though I would gladly contribute to an effort driven by someone else. To my mind, for all the fun of overlapping instances, the single thing that would be most useful in this area would be more well-documented, well-engineered libraries. The last year or two have seen lots of really useful-looking new libraries coming along. But bringing all that under a single roof, rather as the Haskell Library Report did, with reasonable documentation and compatible conventions, would be a great service. It would also be Real Work. Simon