Broken documentation on Hackage.

[Malcolm Wallace]

On 6 Jan 2014, at 12:32, Henning Thielemann wrote:

> Am 06.01.2014 12:59, schrieb Mateusz Kowalczyk:
>> On 06/01/14 10:27, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
>>> 
>>> Haddock also was once stand-alone.  I think it might be time to wind the clock backwards and retrieve this desirable property.
>> 
>> Was Haddock ever stand alone? AFAIK it used to be part of GHC and then
>> David Waern separated it into a separate package.
> 
> The versions with leading zero by Simon Marlow used a custom parser.

Yes, early versions of Haddock assumed that the developer would always write a type signature for any top-level value that is exported.  No need to rely on a compiler to infer a type.  Although inference is hugely useful, I think the discipline of actually writing down what the compiler infers for you is an absolutely essential software engineering practice.  It is one good step towards future maintainability of the library.  At my workplace, for instance, our git repo infrastructure is configured to reject any code that exports a value without an explicit type signature.

Regards,
    Malcolm