From conversations I've had and things I've read, I've always gathered
There appears to be some question as to the backward compatibility goals of Haskell'. Perhaps it's worth bringing out into the open. that the main goal of Haskell' is to address the slightly embarrassing fact that practically no one actually writes code in Haskell, if by Haskell we mean the most recent completed language specification. This obviously argues strongly for a high degree of backward compatibility. On the other hand, I am assuming everyone agrees that we don't want to replicate Java, which (in my view, anyway) is rapidly becoming obsolete because of an eagerness to make the language complex, inconsistent, and generally outright flawed in order to avoid even the most unlikely of broken code. -- Chris