<html><head></head><body>I, too, agree with Richard here. In fact, one (small) reason why we originally chose RestructuredText as the proposal syntax is to make it easy to turn the proposal into users guide documentation.<br><br>Cheers,<br><br>- Ben <br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On March 17, 2021 2:35:54 PM EDT, Richard Eisenberg <rae@richarde.dev> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<pre class="k9mail">My vote is that the manual should be self-standing. References to proposals are good, but as supplementary/background reading only. My gold standard always is: if we lost all the source code to GHC and all its compiled versions, but just had the manual and Haskell Reports (but without external references), we could re-create an interface-equivalent implementation. (I say "interface-equivalent" because we do not specify all the details of e.g. optimizations and interface files.) We are very, very far from that gold standard. Yet I still think it's a good standard to aim for when drafting new sections of the manual.<br><br>Of course, authors are quite free to copy-and-paste from proposal text to form a new manual chapter.<br><br>If we agree about this, it would be good to lay this out somewhere, perhaps in the "care and feeding" chapter.<br><br>Richard<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #729fcf; padding-left: 1ex;">On Mar 17, 2021, at 1:21 PM, Oleg Grenrus <oleg.grenrus@iki.fi> wrote:<br><br>I forgot to link a bit of relevant discussion from<br><a href="https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/406,">https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/406,</a><br>is there a (silent) consensus on the issue?<br><br>- Oleg<br><br>On 17.3.2021 19.15, Oleg Grenrus wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #ad7fa8; padding-left: 1ex;">I have a following question:<br>My lexer rules related proposal was recently accepted. The biggest part<br>of getting it in is writing documentation for it. While looking at<br>Divergence from Haskell 98 and Haskell 2010 section of the user manual,<br>in particular Lexical syntax, it already has See "GHC Proposal #229 for<br>the precise rules.".<br><br>Can I just the same? (I think there was an implicit acceptance of that<br>practice in e.g.<br><a href="https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/merge_requests/1664#note_238759)">https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/merge_requests/1664#note_238759)</a><br><br>However, I think that referring to proposals text for "essential" bits<br>of information is a bad practice.<br>Because GHC proposals are sometimes amended, one have to look into<br>GitHub history to find out what were there for a particular time point<br>of a GHC release. Very laborous.<hr>Currently there is 23 references to about a dozen of proposals. An<br>example are passages like<br><br> In 9.0, the behavior of this extension changed, and now we require<br>that a negative literal must not be preceded by a closing token (see<br> `GHC Proposal #229<br><<a href="https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0229-whitespace-bang-patterns.rst">https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0229-whitespace-bang-patterns.rst</a>>`__<br> for the definition of a closing token).<br><br>or<br><br> a future release will be<br> turned off by default and then possibly removed. The reasons for<br>this and<br> the deprecation schedule are described in `GHC proposal #30<br> <br><<a href="https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0030-remove-star-kind.rst">https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0030-remove-star-kind.rst</a>>`__.<br><br>And there are better examples, which are references for more information,<br>not essential one, like<br><br> See the proposal `DuplicateRecordFields without ambiguous field access<br> <br><<a href="https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0366-no-ambiguous-field-access.rst">https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0366-no-ambiguous-field-access.rst</a>>`_<br> and the documentation on :extension:`DuplicateRecordFields` for<br>further details.<br><br>(I'd put the internal user manual link first), or<br><br> But these automatic eta-expansions may silently change the semantics<br>of the user's program,<br> and deep skolemisation was removed from the language by<br> `GHC Proposal #287<br><<a href="https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0287-simplify-subsumption.rst">https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0287-simplify-subsumption.rst</a>>`__.<br> This proposal has many more examples.<hr>So to boil down my question, can I write<br><br> Lexical syntax of identifiers and decimal numbers differs slightly<br>from the Haskell report.<br> See GHC Proposal #403 for the precise rules and differences.<br><br>- Oleg<hr>ghc-devs mailing list<br>ghc-devs@haskell.org<br><a href="http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs">http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs</a><br></blockquote><hr>ghc-devs mailing list<br>ghc-devs@haskell.org<br><a href="http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs">http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs</a><br></blockquote><hr>ghc-devs mailing list<br>ghc-devs@haskell.org<br><a href="http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs">http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs</a><br></pre></blockquote></div><br>-- <br>Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.</body></html>