On Wed, 28 Dec 2016, Yitzchak Gale wrote:
But after some years of a frozen Prelude, many people feel that we have accumulated cruft, and that now the Prelude needs to be updated again to match modern practice. A sudden upheaval doesn't seem prudent, but incremental changes like this one that give a lot of benefit for little cost seem worthwhile.
What precisely is the problem of importing readMaybe and readEither from Text.Read? The current state means you have to import them, that is, you have to add one import line and this solution works back to GHC-7.6. If we add readMaybe and readEither to Prelude, you may be happy to not add a new import line but you force your library users to the newest version of GHC and you risk to make his programs uncompilable because it may depend on other packages that are not (yet) updated to the newest GHC. If you care for multiple versions of GHC you have to make much more cumbersome import statements or add multiple lines of preprocessor. This seems to be too much effort if 'read' calls should be replaced by other functions anyway.