[Haskell-beginners] Doubts about functional programming paradigm

[Rein Henrichs]

Mr. McIlroy,

FWIW I would love to read more about that McCarthy talk. It
sounds like an amazing experience.

> There is no authoritative source about these pragmas. They are listed
> and described in the GHC User Guide, but that source all too often
> defines solely by example, not even bolstered by a formal syntax
> specification.

I think it would very helpful simply to better (and more rigorously)
document the syntax and semantics of the available extensions. There is
currently a call to action to update GHC's Haddock documentation in
preparation for the 8.0 release [1]. Perhaps some effort can also be
directed towards the documentation of the LANGUAGE pragmas.

There is still a problem, though: For completeness, one must consider
the interactions of the various subsets of these pragmas, some of which
are already known to be unsound. What's worse, the number of extant
pragmas already makes an enumeration of these subsets impractical, since
there are some 10^31 of them even ignoring the "NoX" pragmas.

The only long-term solution then seems to be to codify a new Haskell
standard that incorporates some known-good subset of these pragmas that
the community seems to agree on, which I suppose is part of the task
that the Haskell Prime committee has before them. I do not envy them.

[1]: https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-December/010681.html