[Haskell-cafe] What Functions are Standard?

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

John

| > I have been writing code using the docs over at
| > http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/index.html,
which
| > is the only comprehensive library reference I could find.
| >
| > I am using some code from System.IO, supposedly from base.  When I
try
| > to build this with nhc98, it doesn't know about hGetBuf, hPutBuf, or
| > openBinaryFile from there or about mallocForeignPtrArray from the
| > Foreign.* area.  But all these look standard to me.

This is the GHC library documentation, but Hugs and NHC use the same
source-code repository, but omitting some functionality.   What's
omitted is explicitly documented, at the exact link you give above,
under "Implementation-specific notes".

The language definition for Haskell 98 defines a small collection of
libraries, standardised a long time ago.  But all implementations come
with a much richer set of libraries, many of which are written in
Haskell 98, and almost all of which are usable by Haskell 98 programs.
These are the ones documented above.

Meanwhile lots of people are writing libraries too.  In particular,
there are several libraries around for reading and writing binary files,
and a long recent email thread on the subject.  What I'm hoping is that
someone, or a small group, will decide on a good interface (in the light
of experience thus far) and implement it, so that the rest of us don't
have to choose.

Simon