[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANNOUNCE: Utrecht Haskell Compiler (UHC) --first release

[Sittampalam, Ganesh]

Jon Fairbairn wrote:
> "John A. De Goes" <john at n-brain.net> writes:
> 
>> That's absurd. You have no way to access private source code, so any
>> decision on what features to exclude from future versions of Haskell
>> must necessarily look at publicly accessible source code.
> 
> This is all entirely beside the point. The question is not whether
> n+k patterns should be in the language, it's whether an
> implementation of Haskell 98 should include them.  

>> The only alternative is to continuously add, and never remove,
>> features from Haskell, even if no one (that we
>> know) uses them.
> 
> But we can remove them in future language versions. The point I was
> trying to make at the beginning of this subthread was that
> implementations should follow the definition, because having a core
> language (Haskell 98) that can be relied on is simpler and wastes
> less time than the alternative.    

There has to be a bit of give and take here between standards and
implementations. The Haskell 98 standard is now very old and becoming
increasingly less relevant, hence the Haskell' effort. (n+k) patterns
were always controversial and the decision to include them has indeed
been reversed by the Haskell' committee. So I would say that {Haskell 98
- (n+k)} is itself a worthwhile standard to implement. UHC is clear that
this is what it has implemented, so it's not as if they are
misrepresenting themselves.

Ganesh

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