Hello Neil, Thursday, March 15, 2007, 10:54:03 PM, you wrote:
Do you have a concrete proposal for what FilePath's should look like in Haskell'? "FilePath = String" is currently the least broken design, since no one has put forward a better one.
does http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Library/IO not count?
It is a start, but not the whole answer. What is the type of readFile? Stringable a =>> a -> IO String ?
yes, if we say only about Filepath part and not about type for representing file contents. another variant - provide some FilePath class. but providing your module as separate library will allow to improve this while keeping backward compatibility while including it into base makes this scenario very problematic
Stringable a =>> What about getContents? Can all this be implemented without breaking existing code? Does this stop people from chopping and changing at strings? Is that desirable?
the beauty of this proposal is that we can issue 3rd, 4th and any other version based on real users feedback. including some module into base means stopping of its active development, you can see the situation with ByteString
There are also lots of other questions, does this code want to go into base? Do we want to replace the existing code in base?
Plenty of open questions, I suspect solving them all will take months at the very least...
i think that existing base should be conserved for keeping compatibility with already developed apps/libs and new functionality should be provided in form of cabal packages that can be easily upgraded and even several versions can co-exist in one installation then, functionality should be moved step-by-step from base to these new packages. new functionality should go immediately into packages. otherwise, for example, your shining new version of Cabal which uses System.FilePath module, will be not compatible with ghc 6.6, and the same will be true for all other apps/libs then these packages will evolve. backward compatibility will be provided by supplying old versions of libraries (via hackage or preinstalled)
Is breaking nhc/yhc for something as fundamental as open files acceptable?
i don't understood this question -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com