On 3 February 2011 14:24, John Smith
On 03/02/2011 15:54, Stephen Tetley wrote:
I'd contend the proposal is too disruptive to be independent of a language revision, so I'd vote no on the proposal as it stands.
What do you mean by "independent of a language revision"? The idea is that, if accepted, this will be proposed for Haskell'.
The current proposal is a libraries change against "Base" which is roughly speaking means it is a proposal to change GHC 7.0.2. If the change were made for GHC 7.0.2, code and equally importantly books would be out-of-date. My feeling is that a change of this magnitude should be a change to the language standard i.e. Haskell 2012 (Prelude is covered by the standard). Currently Haskell' asks for changes to be implemented in a compiler before they are considered, I'd argue that whilst this is correct for language extensions it is not necessarily the best situation for library changes where the balance is different: Language extension - the weight of effort borne by the developers of the first implementation to prove the concept. Library change - the weight of effort is borne by the whole community (revising code, new editions of books, etc.)