2013/1/13 wren ng thornton
On 1/13/13 8:55 AM, Gregory Collins wrote:
A especially strong -1 from me to any effort to enforce Haskell 98 compatibility for Haskell Platform packages: that standard is 15 years old now, and has been superseded by Haskell 2010.
I think it would be unjust to require H2010 compliance, however I do think it would be good to strongly suggest that people hew closer to the standard than they would in non-platform code.
This is reasonable on its face; but the motivation of supporting research implementations is perhaps less than practical. Is the platform, as a "batteries included" environment, really intended to support compiler writers and researchers? In practice, production code is written for GHC and likely even relies on it for performance, syntax features and type system extensions. Many production languages are in practice defined by a leading implementation, the one used in production, even if they have a few research implementations. (The varied JVMs, Rubies and Pythons of the world come to mind.) Perhaps "production Haskell" has to be understood as a distinctive line of development of the language, marked out and maintained in a way compatible with its needs. -- Jason Dusek pgp // solidsnack // C1EBC57DC55144F35460C8DF1FD4C6C1FED18A2B