Minor tweaks

Mark P Jones mpj@cse.ogi.edu
Tue, 6 Mar 2001 09:29:52 -0800


Hi Sigbjorn!

| BTW, is there a technical reason why toggling between Haskell98
| and Hugs mode can only be done at startup time?

It was a design philosophy rather than an essential feature.  Would it
make sense to allow somebody to :set -98, then :load a file containing
rank-2 polymorphism, overlapping instances, etc..., then :set +98 and
:also a standard Haskell 98 file?  What language would they be using
at that point?  I concluded that it would be better to give Hugs two
distinct identities, rather than a confusing and schizophrenic
personality that drew no clear lines between +/-98.

That said, you could easily hack the code to allow users to switch
modes without restarting the interpreter.  But it wasn't designed to
run that way, so I wouldn't trust it to work correctly either ...

All the best,
Mark