Hello haskell-prime, one more proposal is about standard libs. it is well known that today libs outweighs all other parts of modern language and work on their standardization will probably stall the whole Haskell-prime process. OTOH, languages like Java was grown due to their rich set of libraries, which is far more than any committee may even discuss, all the more invent. afaiu, Java versions just standardize libraries that are in wide use on the moment of standard acceptance i propose to do the same. first, library developers should follow http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Package_versioning_policy second, every year Haskell committee should decide which libraries of currently Hackage-available are most widely used, portable and free, and call this set a "Haskell-xxxx standard libraries", together with versions inspected. Next year some libs may disappear from the list, some new appear and some upgrade to newer versions. so, we may had: H2008 libs: base 3.0, FPS 1.0, Binary 1.0 H2009 libs: base 3.0, FPS 2.0, SuperBinary 0.1 With above-mentioned versioning policy, this means that any "FPS 1.0.*" will comply to the H08 standard and this means that this line of version may continue to fix bugs, improve performance, add support for new systems, while keeping its interface Third, each compiler shipped should declare which HSL (Haskell Standard Libraries) versions it supports. F.e.: ghc 7.10: HSL 2010-2014 ghc 7.12: HSL 2011-2014 ... So, every new compiler version will try to support newest HSL versions and try to keep compatibility with old ones while they last in wide use, and newer compilers/platforms may be supported by old libs by publishing their minor modifications (base 3.0.1, base 3.0.2 and so on) Fourth, this may make Haskell education more organized - i.e. book or course may declare that it teaches Haskell-2008 standard with HSL-2010 libraries and this will mean that at the end programmer will be able to use some set of functionality (i.e. all the libs included in the HSL-2010) and that his knowledge will allow him to immediately start working with ghc 7.0-8.10, hugs 2010-2015 and jhc 1.0-1.5, for example One important drawback that i see here is that "full" compiler downloads should be shipped with older library versions too - i.e. providing newest FPS library will be not enough, you need to ship older HSL libraries too -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com