I'm in favour of starting a separate stream library, and I would expect it to diverge from the list library over time.
I agree: this should probably be a separate library for now, until we see how far it grows. There's an awful lot of other things not in base: queues, difference lists, comonads, that live outside base, and I'm not sure there's a strong enough case yet that this should go into base.
I think you're taking Conor's quote out of context. If I understand it correctly, he's replying to Neil Mitchell's post; he is arguing for a separate library different from Data.List. I don't think he objects to including it in base. Conor makes a strong case for separating lists and streams: they are different types, with fundamentally different properties. I don't claim that the proposed Stream library is the final word on the subject, but it is a theoretically solid and the content is completely uncontroversial. If nothing else, it is a starting point for encouraging more coinductive Haskell programming. For that reason, I'd argue for including it in the standard distribution. I am not too concerned whether or not this library should go into base or a separate package. I'd be happy to settle for Codata.Stream. This is easy to separate from base and does not cause any conflicts. Other libraries can be added to the Codata package, as we see fit. I would argue against calling the ByteString package Data.Stream. As tempting as it may be, the package is not about streams, but colists. There's quite some literature on the subject - see for instance Tarmo Uustalu's "Essence of Data Flow Programming" http://cs.ioc.ee/~tarmo/ papers/essence.pdf, numerous papers by Jan Rutten (http:// homepages.cwi.nl/~janr/papers/, for instance http://homepages.cwi.nl/ ~janr/papers/files-of-papers/CRM.pdf), various proceedings of CALCO, etc. I can understand that Stream sounds quite punchy and suitably coinductive, but calling this library Data.Stream will confuse certain people. I don't want to sound at all negative: I think the library is nothing short of phenomenal and "by any other name would smell as sweet". Best, Wouter