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

[Ben Gamari]

I, too, agree with Richard here. In fact, one (small) reason why we originally chose RestructuredText as the proposal syntax is to make it easy to turn the proposal into users guide documentation.

Cheers,

- Ben 

On March 17, 2021 2:35:54 PM EDT, 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.
>
>Of course, authors are quite free to copy-and-paste from proposal text
>to form a new manual chapter.
>
>If we agree about this, it would be good to lay this out somewhere,
>perhaps in the "care and feeding" chapter.
>
>Richard
>
>> On Mar 17, 2021, at 1:21 PM, Oleg Grenrus <oleg.grenrus at iki.fi>
>wrote:
>> 
>> I forgot to link a bit of relevant discussion from
>> https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/406,
>> is there a (silent) consensus on the issue?
>> 
>> - Oleg
>> 
>> On 17.3.2021 19.15, Oleg Grenrus wrote:
>>> I have a following question:
>>> My lexer rules related proposal was recently accepted. The biggest
>part
>>> of getting it in is writing documentation for it. While looking at
>>> Divergence from Haskell 98 and Haskell 2010 section of the user
>manual,
>>> in particular Lexical syntax, it already has See "GHC Proposal #229
>for
>>> the precise rules.".
>>> 
>>> Can I just the same? (I think there was an implicit acceptance of
>that
>>> practice in e.g.
>>>
>https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/merge_requests/1664#note_238759)
>>> 
>>> However, I think that referring to proposals text for "essential"
>bits
>>> of information is a bad practice.
>>> Because GHC proposals are sometimes amended, one have to look into
>>> GitHub history to find out what were there for a particular time
>point
>>> of a GHC release. Very laborous.
>>> 
>>> ---
>>> 
>>> Currently there is 23 references to about a dozen of proposals. An
>>> example are passages like
>>> 
>>>     In 9.0, the behavior of this extension changed, and now we
>require
>>> that a negative literal must not be preceded by a closing token (see
>>>     `GHC Proposal #229
>>>
><https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0229-whitespace-bang-patterns.rst>`__
>>>     for the definition of a closing token).
>>> 
>>> or
>>> 
>>>      a future release will be
>>>      turned off by default and then possibly removed. The reasons
>for
>>> this and
>>>      the deprecation schedule are described in `GHC proposal #30
>>>     
>>>
><https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0030-remove-star-kind.rst>`__.
>>> 
>>> And there are better examples, which are references for more
>information,
>>> not essential one, like
>>> 
>>>      See the proposal `DuplicateRecordFields without ambiguous field
>access
>>>     
>>>
><https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0366-no-ambiguous-field-access.rst>`_
>>>      and the documentation on :extension:`DuplicateRecordFields` for
>>> further details.
>>> 
>>> (I'd put the internal user manual link first), or
>>> 
>>>     But these automatic eta-expansions may silently change the
>semantics
>>> of the user's program,
>>>     and deep skolemisation was removed from the language by
>>>     `GHC Proposal #287
>>>
><https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0287-simplify-subsumption.rst>`__.
>>>     This proposal has many more examples.
>>> 
>>> ---
>>> 
>>> So to boil down my question, can I write
>>> 
>>>     Lexical syntax of identifiers and decimal numbers differs
>slightly
>>> from the Haskell report.
>>>     See GHC Proposal #403 for the precise rules and differences.
>>> 
>>> - Oleg
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> ghc-devs mailing list
>>> ghc-devs at haskell.org
>>> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
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-- 
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