John Meacham wrote:
Please don't deprecate these modules. It is actively contributing to bitrot to deprecate a perfectly useful and well defined API.
I think "deprecate" is just the wrong word. Gwern is not saying that we should remove haskell98 from Hackage, nor remove the -98 flag from Hugs, nor build a special case into compilers that make modules not compile if they use Haskell 98 syntax. As I understand it, the problem he is trying to solve is the following: Haskell code today uses hierarchical module names almost universally. This has been the case for years. Yet a huge number of packages on Hackage directly or indirectly depend on the the haskell98 module, whose sole purpose is to allow the old non-hierarchical module names from pre-addendum Haskell 98. Gwern is just trying to think of a way to remove all of those spurious dependencies. I agree that this cleanup would be a good idea. The only question is, how do we best go about it? Or have I misunderstood? Thanks, Yitz