On Sun, Mar 11, 2001 at 01:28:38PM +0000, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
Proposal 2b: adopt a "Std." namespace for libraries that are common to all implementations.
* There is little agreement here. Simon M, Manuel, and others have expressed their doubts that it is workable. No-one has defended the idea except me. But then Simon posted a hierarchy layout proposal in which "Haskell." seemed to take the role of "Std.". So I'm a bit confused. I'd like to see some more discussion about this.
I think that a common prefix for the standard libraries will get to be a pain far more than one for non standard ones, and non standard ones are going to have a huge prefix for uniqueness anyway. The chances are most modules will either be in . or be standard anyway. My vote is for a user.* hierarchy with mangled e-mail addresses as I have previously described.
That'd be fine with me. Actually, to address Malcolm's (understandable) confusion, the differences between "Haskell" and "Std" are mainly that entry into "Haskell" is much easier. For a new library, it could be brought in immediately but marked "non-standard" until such time as the community has discussed and agreed on an interface. In the meantime, compilers would be free to distribute the non-standard version for testing. I've no objection to dropping the "Haskell" prefix and adding a prefix for the non-"Haskell" parts of the tree. An alternative might be to adopt an extension such that import Haskell. would add D/Haskell/ to the search path for each D in the current search path, and perhaps the "import Haskell." could be implicit, like "import Prelude".
Proposal 3: develop a social process for adding new libraries to the "standard" set.
* Well, this list is the starting point, so there's not much more to be said on that. * The set of criteria by which we as a community might judge whether a library is recognised as "standard" have not really received any comment.
In the absence of some sort of committee or community voting, it essentially comes down to what the hugs, GHC and NHC maintainers agree on in practise. As things stand I suspect it will be decided between then with the more controversial ones argued out on a mailing list.
Voting is something we want to avoid, I think. Too often you end up with a result you don't like :-). Open discussion, followed by an informed decision by a few trusted individuals would get my vote. Cheers, Simon