From: Stephane Bortzmeyer [mailto:bortzmeyer@nic.fr]

As someone who is not an academic researcher and not a student in CS, I would like to express a personal opinion; we don't need a new standard. To me, Haskell needs more libraries, more users (which means more debugging and more documentations), more implementations, of course more real applications (darcs did a lot of the success of Haskell), so we can read their code, push sysadmins to install Haskell, etc.

A significant number of Haskell libraries, both user-contributed and compiler-bundled (in the "standard" library hierarchy), are not written in Haskell98, and rely on a number of (typically well supported) language extensions like multi-parameter type classes + functional dependencies, existential types, hierarchical modules, etc. Some libraries target a specific compiler (often GHC). It should be clear that standardising the popular extensions would make a greater number of compiler-bundled and user-contributed libraries standards compliant, which has the obvious benefit that they can be used with any standardised compiler/interpreter i.e. they become more portable. Alistair. ----------------------------------------- ***************************************************************** Confidentiality Note: The information contained in this message, and any attachments, may contain confidential and/or privileged material. It is intended solely for the person(s) or entity to which it is addressed. Any review, retransmission, dissemination, or taking of any action in reliance upon this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient(s) is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from any computer. *****************************************************************