Ravi Nanavati has very helpfully put together a status report for the Haskell Prime process. Please see this link, or read the pasted text below: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/Status' peace, isaac Summary: Since the Haskell Workshop last year, the Haskell community has documented (on this wiki) over 70 proposals for changes to Haskell 98. In March of this year, two subcommittees were established to focus on concurrency and the class system - two difficult areas that are important to the success of Haskell'. The committee has also used StrawPolls to filter and discuss the universe of proposals that has been gathered. Based on the most recent straw poll, 12 proposals (listed in the table at the bottom of the page) have been identified that are expected to get into Haskell' (over 2/3 of the committee in favor). An additional 19 proposals seem likely to get into Haskell' (based on slightly weaker criteria). Members of the committee conflict on 9 of the remaining proposals, and their status will be determined during the writing process. The remaining proposals are not expected to be part of Haskell'. Concurrency: The concurrency support in Haskell' will be based on the Control.Concurrent library, with minor modifications. There will be a thread-safe interface for mutable state, suitable for use in library code that does not otherwise use concurrency (though what it will be based on is an open issue). There will also be independent FFI annotations for specifying whether foreign calls are concurrent (with other Haskell threads) and reentrant. Bound threads will not be required by the concurrency standard, but they will be an allowed extension with a specified meaning. Open issues include whether standard will require preemptive concurrency, the syntax of the new FFI annotations and the memory-model semantics of IORefs. Class system: The work on the class system has focused on resolving the MultiParamTypeClassesDilemma. The core of the dilemma is that multi-parameter typeclasses are a popular extension that is strongly desired for Haskell'. However, many important uses of MPTCs (like the monad transformer library) require additional extensions to resolve ambiguities in their typechecking. Historically, FunctionalDependencies have been used for this purpose, but they are very tricky to implement and are also difficult to specify in a way that guarantees the termination of typechecking. AssociatedTypes are a possible replacement, but our current implementation experience with them is very limited. The subcommittee has explored several ways to resolve this dilemma (including restricted FDs, fast-tracked ATs and FDs as a "blessed" extension), but, so far, no consensus has emerged. Our current plan is to focus on writing other parts of the Haskell' standard, in the hopes that additional implementation experience with ATs will clarify the situation. Libraries: Thus far, libraries have been an underemphasized portion of the Haskell' effort (only 7 of the 70+ proposals have significant library content). However, there is a consensus that a revised standard library is an important part of the Haskell' effort. The current plan is to focus on starting to write the language portions of the standard first, since we have a substantial amount of work to do there which requires focused attention. After that effort is well underway, a companion library effort will begin. Several members of the committee have volunteered for this effort and additional volunteers will be needed. "definitely-in" Proposal Status: Description (Those volunteering to write this section): add some kind of Concurrency (IJ, SM) add ForeignFunctionInterface (MC, SM) add multi-parameter type classes (MS) add RankNTypes or Rank2Types (AL) add PolymorphicComponents (AL) add ExistentialQuantification (existential components) (AL, MS, SJT) add HierarchicalModules (IJ, BH, MW) add EmptyDataDeclarations (BH, HN) DoAndIfThenElse (SM, HN) fix comment syntax grammar (SM) add PatternGuards (RN, DS) add InfixTypeConstructors (BH, AL)