Haskell Platform Proposal: HLint

[Yitzchak Gale]

Neil Mitchell wrote:
> I'm not entirely sure what the intended audience is for this simple
> AST. Unless someone's going to use it, I don't see much point in it
> existing.

When you just use the AST, you can ignore the bits that
you don't need. But when you need to transform it, there is
no way to ignore parts of it. And that creates a huge amount
of extra work and boilerplate code with the current
feature-loaded AST.

In addition, a high-quality parser whose AST more faithfully
reflects the Haskell 20nn standard is very useful in many ways
in the area of verification, validation, and certification.

So any work in this direction would certainly be worthwhile.

> I see no reason to even suggest this work be a precondition for
> inclusion in the platform.

Well, it's not a precondition really. But it would mean including
haskell-src-exts with its current name. We could do that and
change the name later, or we could do that and keep the name
forever as a historical curiosity. Or we could just wait a bit until
the next HP release to make the change. Any of those are
reasonable. The consensus seems to be that we'll wait a bit
until we can change the name before including it in the platform.
In the meantime, haskell-src-exts is still available as always
with a simple cabal install.

If people are absolutely keen on getting haskell-src-exts
into the platform immediately with its new name, another strategy
could be to rename haskell-src to haskell98-src and haskell-src-exts to
haskell-src.

Regards,
Yitz