Malcolm Wallace <Malcolm.Wallace(a)cs.york.ac.uk> wrote:
<snip>
> I remember Mark Jones suggesting more-or-less exactly this idea back
> in about 1998/1999. It has been implemented in nhc98 ever since, but
> I finally deleted it from CVS recently because no other systems
> supported it. And (probably the more major reason) because I
> frequently forgot to keep it up to date. Here was the signature:
>
> module Haskell where
>
> import Time
> import Locale
>
> systemName :: String -- "Hugs", "GHC", "hbc", "nhc", "qhc", ..
> .
> haskellVersion :: Int -- 13, 14, 98, 2000, ...
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I wholeheartedly endorse this, but these days I think (Version,
[String]) would be a better type, i.e., (haskell98, ["Standard FFI",
"Multi-parameter type classes", "Functional Dependencies", ...].
Knowing the Haskell version number by itself won't be much good until
the Haskell 2.0 standard, but knowing which extensions are present
(independent of the compiler version) would be a very good thing
(listing syntactic extensions isn't an entirely useless thing; I'm sure
it would make Autoconf's job easier).
> releaseDate :: CalendarTime -- ...
> version :: String -- some combination of the above
<snip>
Jon Cast
