[Haskell-beginners] Is ghc 6.8.2 useful?

[Erik de Castro Lopo]

Thomas Davie wrote:

> Are you sure that you're finding things that are unavailable in  
> 6.8.2?

Specifically the things I found missing in just the last couple of
hours are:

    - module Text.Regex.Posix
    - functions readProcess/readProcessWithExitCode from System.Process
    - function exitSuccess from System.Exit

> There's been very little change to the APIs exposed to  
> beginners since then.

I must admit I am jumping in at the deep end, but I do have 4 years of
pretty extensive Ocaml coding under my belt.

> It may be that you're not importing the module  
> required

Haskell's modules are quite similar to Ocaml's but I'm pretty confident
I have this under control.

> Sorry if I just taught my granny to suck eggs.

I'm not your granny :-)

>  If you are doing this  
> and really are coming up against APIs that aren't in 6.8, then yes,  
> you need to upgrade your compiler.

I'll take that as an ACK.

> There's no real disadvantage to  
> doing this though, except possibly that you lose support for one or  
> two libraries that are taking a while to update (gtk2hs springs to  
> mind).

Ouch. I'm pretty attached to the debian packaging system on my Debian
and Ubuntu systems and really don't like to install non-packaged 
binaries or source. On top of that I like to use existing libraries
whereever possible and that means installing these from source as
well.

I might have to look into cabal-debian.

Cheers,
Erik
-- 
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Erik de Castro Lopo
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Gambling(n): A discretionary tax on those asleep during high school
maths.