[Haskell] Announcing the new Haskell Prime process, and Haskell 2010
At last year's Haskell Symposium, it was announced that we would change the Haskell Prime process to make it less monolithic. Since then, everyone has been busy using Haskell (or implementing it), and we haven't made much progress on the standardisation side of things. Well, with ICFP and the Haskell Symposium approaching we felt it was time to get the new process moving and hopefully produce a language revision this year. I've updated the Haskell' wiki with the new information; in particular the process is documented here: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/Process We're aiming to announce the list of accepted proposals at the Haskell Symposium this year. However, owing to the short timescale, the list is going to be correspondingly short, and limited to extensions which are either already fully specified (i.e. the FFI) or are small and well-understood. The following list is very provisional; we'll be making the final decisions next month. ForeignFunctionInterface LineCommentSyntax PatternGuards DoAndIfThenElse Remove n+k patterns RelaxedDependencyAnalysis EmptyDataDeclarations HierarchicalModules NonDecreasingIndentation remove FixityResolution from the context-free grammar change the syntax of QualifiedOperators In the coming weeks we'll be refining proposals in preparation for Haskell 2010. By all means suggest more possibilities; however note that as per the new process, a proposal must be "complete" (i.e. in the form of an addendum) in order to be a candidate for acceptance. I have updated the status page http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/Status marking everything except the proposals that have been already implemented in the draft Report as "old". The new process requires a proposal to have an owner or owners in order to make progress; once a proposal has an owner it will move into the "under discussion" state. To take up ownership of an existing proposal, or to start a new proposal, ask on the mailing list. There are other ways you can get involved; some suggestions are on the Haskell' main page: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki (hmm, I suppose we should fix that logo too...) Cheers, Simon
At last year's Haskell Symposium, it was announced that we would change the Haskell Prime process to make it less monolithic. .. In the coming weeks we'll be refining proposals in preparation for Haskell 2010.
Given the incremental nature of the new standards, would it be useful to switch back to version numbers, eg "Haskell 2.0.0 (2010)" instead of "Haskell 2010"? Otherwise, we'll end up with half a dozen more or less current Haskells related by no obvious means. "Haskell'98" was chosen because it projected more permanence than the Haskell 1.x line of Haskell revisions that came before it. Having API instead of date encoded in the name would support deprecations, breaking changes, or additions as well as make it clear whether a new year's version does break anything or not. Btw, once upon a time, there was a discussion about an even more modular approach, standardising language extensions without saying which extensions made up a standard language. That would give support to the status quo, where people want to use, say, Haskell'98+FFI+Hierarchical Modules+MPTC+.. In other words, existing language extensions (LANGUAGE pragmas) ought to be standardized (currently, they mean different things in different implementations), independent of whether or not the committee decides to group them into a Haskell X. Claus
On Jul 7, 2009, at 11:40 , Claus Reinke wrote:
At last year's Haskell Symposium, it was announced that we would change the Haskell Prime process to make it less monolithic. .. In the coming weeks we'll be refining proposals in preparation for Haskell 2010.
Given the incremental nature of the new standards, would it be useful to switch back to version numbers, eg "Haskell 2.0.0 (2010)" instead of "Haskell 2010"? Otherwise, we'll end up with half a dozen more or less current Haskells related by no obvious means. "Haskell'98" was chosen because it projected more permanence than the Haskell 1.x line of Haskell revisions that came before it.
Arguably it was *too* successful at that. -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH
participants (3)
-
Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH -
Claus Reinke -
Simon Marlow