On Tue, Feb 27, 2001 at 03:35:31PM +0000, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
The implication of the Std. namespace is that all such "standard" libraries will be distributed with all Haskell systems. In other words, you can rely on a standard library always being there, and always having the same interface on all systems.
What's about version changes? How can anybody garantee that a library is stable? Some functions or instances may become obsolete or even disappear. Other may be needed in later versions of the library.
We can't provide absolute guarantees of course. But this is no different from the situation with standard libraries in other languages - witness the difficulties with libc versions etc. I think the best we can do realistically is to aim for maximum stability.
But note that there is a well-defined "soname" mechanism in the Unix world to deal with this issue. This usually works on the object level rather than the source level; it is usually hard to compile against an old version of the library (without renaming the library to include a version number). Probably we don't need to worry about this now. Best, Dylan Thurston