[ghc-steering-committee] A few more pleas

[Richard Eisenberg]

> On Dec 9, 2020, at 6:17 AM, Spiwack, Arnaud <arnaud.spiwack at tweag.io> wrote:
>  Or would you rather see these stay in their standalone extensions forever? (which I would find, personally, rather alarming)

I'm attacking from the standpoint that these will be extensions forever -- or, at least until we have a specification of them. (Amazingly, we don't have a specification for either one, right now.) Haskell will always have new learners, and I think it's reasonable to guard some advanced features behind extensions, always. Perhaps we need to simplify the space of extensions (including a FancyTypes or DependentTypes extension), but I'd be happy to see these features guarded into perpetuity.

About specification: The OutsideIn paper includes an overly-generous specification of GADTs, but not a precise one. I am unaware of a precise specification of what programs are accepted with GADTs, beyond the GHC implementation. Along similar lines, there is no specification of how type families reduce. (For example, what happens with `type family F where F = If True Int F`?)

> How is a partial type signature a partially-written program? Does the absence of type signature on a binding make a program partially written? Because a partial type signature is more than no signature at all, so it should be considered less partial at least.

This is a good point. I see partial type signatures as a development tool, where a user elides part of a type signature in order to get the compiler to provide information on how to fill it in. But maybe that's not the best viewpoint.

Richard