Those on the Haskell' mailing list may have seen recent signs of activity on the Haskell' front. I thought I should clarify the current status, and update the community on our plans for Haskell'. The main sticking point in the design of Haskell' has been the type system: namely whether Haskell' should have Functional Dependencies or Type Families. This issue is still undecided, although the experts are hard at work on developing a stronger understanding of Type Families in particular. Nevertheless, the committee feels that we cannot have a Haskell' without some way to resolve ambiguities when using multi-parameter type classes, be it Functional Dependencies (FDs) or Type Families (TFs). For one thing, a great deal of existing code uses FDs or depends on code that does, so unless we adopt one of these extensions all this code will still exist outside of Haskell', and that is far from ideal. So we decided to proceed in two stages: - "Haskell' alpha" will be a complete language specification, including all the modifications and additions we want to make to the language *except* for FDs or TFs. - Haskell' will follow afterward, adding either FDs or TFs. The motivation for this two-stage approach is that we can make progress on all the other parts of the language without being blocked on the type system, we can start work on implementing Haskell' alpha in our compilers, users can start using the new standard, and we can gain some experience with using it in practice. On the process side of things, we're now tracking the status of all language design proposals on this page: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/Status and as usual all the Haskell' resources are on the wiki: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki The committee have been discussing various proposals amongst ourselves over the past few weeks, with the goal of making as many concrete decisions as possible. However, the general policy is still for technical discussions to take place in public, as far as possible. Changes to the status page are sent to the public mailing list, and we welcome comments on any of the issues, regardless of status. Thanks for your patience :-) And rest assured that progress is being made! Cheers, Simon (and the Haskell' committee)