Is referring to GHC-proposals in GHC user manual bad practice or not?

Viktor Dukhovni ietf-dane at dukhovni.org
Wed Mar 17 18:42:38 UTC 2021


> On Mar 17, 2021, at 2:35 PM, Richard Eisenberg <rae at richarde.dev> wrote:
> 
> My vote is that the manual should be self-standing. References to proposals are good, but as supplementary/background reading only. My gold standard always is: if we lost all the source code to GHC and all its compiled versions, but just had the manual and Haskell Reports (but without external references), we could re-create an interface-equivalent implementation. (I say "interface-equivalent" because we do not specify all the details of e.g. optimizations and interface files.) We are very, very far from that gold standard. Yet I still think it's a good standard to aim for when drafting new sections of the manual.

I strongly agree.  Tracking down the evolving proposals, is rather
a chore...

-- 
	Viktor.



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