"Simon Marlow"
(a) we're going to standardise concurrency anyway
Well, but that only begs the question, what *kind* of concurrency are we going to standardise on? e.g. Will we admit all variations of scheduling (co-operative, time-slice, and pre-emptive)?
(b) it is unlikely that Hugs or JHC will implement concurrency even if it goes into the standard
Now this is something that puzzles me. I was under the impression that Hugs already implements concurrency, using pretty much the same APIs as ghc. I'd also like to know a bit more about jhc's position here. Is it just that JohnM wants to keep his compiler "pure" and free from having a runtime-system? Or are there other issues?
Yes there are several ramifications of this decision, but none of them are technical. As I see it, we either specify Concurrency as an addendum, or NoConcurrency as an addendum, and both options are about the same amount of work.
There are certainly technical questions. If Hugs's implementation of concurrency is not concurrency after all, on what basis do we make that determination? Why is a definition of concurrency that encompasses both ghc and Hugs models unacceptable? Regards, Malcolm