On 12 Mar 2010, at 02:11, John Meacham wrote:
Except that writing a program that just uses Haskell 98 is a virtue, not a vice. When you target a standard your program becomes much easier to maintain. As it is now, it is a major pain to write future compatible haskell.
+1 from me. This is exactly the purpose of standards. If you have multiple overlapping standards, then perhaps it would make sense to deprecate some of them. But we are in the situation of having only two current standards ('98 and 2010), and they exactly agree on the contents of these libraries. Furthermore, the H'98 standard itself states It is intended to be a "stable" language in sense the implementors are committed to supporting Haskell 98 exactly as specified, for the foreseeable future. The base library package has no such guarantee - it is not supported in its entirety by all compilers, and it changes frequently. (As one data point, base changes frequently enough and severely enough to break my nightly builds of nhc98 several times a year.) In my view there is no way that base can be called stable yet. Regards, Malcolm