On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 11:06 PM, Nate Soares
This standardization process amounts to "endorsement of existing features" which seems like not a bad process at all. It makes the standard descriptive rather than predictive.
+1. I agree generally with Gabor's points -- GHC is in the drivers seat. But at some point we should take a look at all the things GHC has made that did pay off and that are good and make them official.
I'd very much like to see that endorsement happen soon, even if it's not aggressive.
Well, I'm not so sure it's a great idea to just bake "what GHC does at this moment" (for any particular extension) into the standard without really thinking about it. Even then, you have to figure out, in great detail, what GHC does, and write it all down! That's not negligible effort, either. And the alternative is to also publicly discuss and hash all of it out down to the little tiny gritty stuff. But wanting to write a new standard (big effort!) just to get rid of some pragmas and make people feel better (small payoff!) feels like a mismatch to me. Maybe as some kind of useful in-between point, the GHC folks could figure out which extensions they like enough that they would, modulo all the details getting figured out and specified, be in favor of them going into a new standard, and fold all of them into a new LANGUAGE definition? So then you would write {-# LANGUAGE HaskellNext #-}, or HaskellGHC, or something like that, to enable all of them in one go. That wouldn't require specifying things down to the tiniest details (which is what a standard requires), but only at the granularity of particular extensions, which is what people seem to be looking for. Maybe instead of the GHC people deciding it, there could be some kind of community process (such as a vote). (And yeah, this sounds eerily similar to -fglasgow-exts, which is what we got rid of in favor of LANGUAGE pragmas, but maybe the fact that -fglasgow-exts turned mostly all extensions on indiscriminately, whereas this would be a curated subset, is a significant enough difference to turn it from a bad idea into a good one.) -- Your ship was destroyed in a monadic eruption.