Malcolm Wallace wrote:
[ Actually, to be honest I'm not quite sure why the Prelude module lives in the base package, rather than the haskell98 package? The same question applies to the Numeric module. ]
Packages don't support re-exposing modules from other packages right now; it has been suggested as an extension from time to time. If we did have support for re-exposing then the haskell98 package could re-expose Prelude and Numeric, and it would be possible for a pure Haskell 98 program/library to depend only on the haskell98 package. Right now we have the situation that a program/library can be independent of the haskell98 package, which wouldn't be true if Prelude were in haskell98. Also it would make building base a bit harder, because nothing would be able to import Prelude. Cheers, Simon