At last year's Haskell Symposium, it was announced that we would change the Haskell Prime process to make it less monolithic. .. In the coming weeks we'll be refining proposals in preparation for Haskell 2010.
Given the incremental nature of the new standards, would it be useful to switch back to version numbers, eg "Haskell 2.0.0 (2010)" instead of "Haskell 2010"? Otherwise, we'll end up with half a dozen more or less current Haskells related by no obvious means. "Haskell'98" was chosen because it projected more permanence than the Haskell 1.x line of Haskell revisions that came before it. Having API instead of date encoded in the name would support deprecations, breaking changes, or additions as well as make it clear whether a new year's version does break anything or not. Btw, once upon a time, there was a discussion about an even more modular approach, standardising language extensions without saying which extensions made up a standard language. That would give support to the status quo, where people want to use, say, Haskell'98+FFI+Hierarchical Modules+MPTC+.. In other words, existing language extensions (LANGUAGE pragmas) ought to be standardized (currently, they mean different things in different implementations), independent of whether or not the committee decides to group them into a Haskell X. Claus