jur
On Jan 25, 2006, at 9:37 AM, Johannes Waldmann wrote:
Dear all, in the "mission statement" I read
We will strive to only include tried-and-true language features,
but the current discussion seems to have a wider focus, i. e. it is more of a wish list. Indeed I think that this is a good idea (ask (future) Haskell users what they want) but it might not be the original goal of the Haskell-Prime effort.
Hello,
I have been on this mailing list since yesterday, so maybe this has been addressed before.
My first question is: who are the future users of Haskell?
For instance: is this group homogenuous enough to define a single standard, or would it be advisable to define various layers in the language.
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.
A compiler may then choose to support up to and including a number of layers. I can imagine a compiler for students to learn functional programming with to have seriously different demands from the compiler used by researchers to do programming language research. I am usually not happy with the fact that novice programmers pay in clarity (of type error messages and diagnostics in general) for features they won't be using for a number of years. This choice can be left up the compiler builder, but I think it might have a place here too.
Have you looked at the Helium language / compiler? It's a stripped-down version of Haskell for teaching. Maybe that's what you're actually suggesting? I think this is a great idea :) peace, isaac