No language can serve all of the people all of the time, but I think we should just do our best with a single standard. I think that the complexity of multiple languages / layers / standards would not be worth the payoff.
My original understanding of the Haskell' effort was that it was *not* intended as going for "Haskell 2", but rather as an update of Haskell 98. In other words, the target is Haskell 2005: - anything that was tried and tested by the end of 2005 is a potential candidate for inclusion in Haskell 2005. nothing else is. this would necessarily exclude much of the discussion here, for which I'd see only three ways out: - make an exception to rule one (bad, but occasionally needed) - ignore and leave for Haskell 2, whenever that might be (impractical) - standardise as an optional addendum to Haskell 2005, to lay the groundwork for Haskell 2010, and to narrow down on the more successful experiments (good, avoid adhoc Haskell 2 in favour of incremental approximations) and the third way seems the most likely to succeed. There'll always be Haskell xx+extensions (unless people stop experimenting) and some extensions are good enough to be standardised (perhaps with options), even if not yet good enough to be part of the current standard. Has the target changed, or was I misled to think of it this way?-) btw, I'd find it hard to track discussion on a wiki/ticket system alone. Could a member of the committee arrange for a Haskell'-weekly message, please (similar to Haskell weekly, but collecting news headers and links from haskell', wiki, track, and internal committee discussions)? cheers, claus ps. will haskell 98 support continue when the new standard comes out, or will there always be 2 languages (standard and standard+)?