My 2 cents: John Lask (Thu, Nov 17, 2005 at 08:57:52AM +1030):
I would like to sound out the Haskell community on what the feeling are most desirable to improve the "commerciality" (i.e. its general use) of ghc and Haskell in general (as distinct from feature set)
3) Macro / conditional compilation / compiler meta language / additional binding forms These are perhaps distinct issues but can be discussed together. The prevalent use of #ifdef and the cpp is indicative of the general need to have some standard means by which differences between compilers ghc/hugs/nhc can be accommodated for in the source code. To date this issue has not been tackled in any meaningful way, perhaps we can continue to use cpp but for the sake of portability
A means of defining additional binding forms would be nice as it would further facilitate embedded dsl for which Haskell is pre-eminent, and which use is a great motivator for venturing into Haskell in the first place.
The macro languages tend to become more and more complex over time. Eventually, you have two complex languages. First, a Haskell Macro Language, second Haskell. Why can we not use staging like in Omega, cf. [1], or Template Haskell? Maybe Haskell itself can generate the compiler and system specific source? [1] http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~sheard/Omega/index.html Regards, -- Stefan Karrmann