[ghc-steering-committee] What do we need from the linear-types proposal?

[Iavor Diatchki]

Hello,

Coming up with a concrete list of suggestions is hard, but here are a
couple things that would make it easier for me to understand large
proposals (e.g., like the linear types one):

   1. It is good if large proposals are "modular", meaning that you can
understand them (and perhaps implement them), one piece at a time.  For
example, adding certain features to the language may enable us to make
library changes, but that sort of thing can be disused separately.

   2. I think that it would be good if the proposal contains enough
information to get a feeling for the core idea of the proposal, both how it
might be used, and about how it might be implemented, without referring to
external papers.   One thing that works well for me is to see lots of
examples which illustrate various aspects of the design.  Generally, I find
it much easier to understand and generalize from a set of examples, than a
set of rules, especially if the rules are not accompanied by an explanation
of the reasons for choosing them.

-Iavor








On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 2:04 PM Richard Eisenberg <rae at cs.brynmawr.edu>
wrote:

>
> > On Nov 27, 2017, at 9:58 AM, Simon Peyton Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > * If a proposal requires a change to Core, that change should be
> >  described rather precisely.
>
> In Greek or in Haskell? Less tersely: does a formalization in a paper
> suffice? Or should the proposal write out the new Haskell definition? These
> are closely related, but not the same. (For example, formalizations don't
> include the AppTy/TyConApp/FunTy distinction that is important for
> performance.)
>
> My own view is that Greek is enough.
>
> Richard
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