Deja vu: Re: In hoc signo vinces (Was: Revamping the numeric classes)

[Laszlo Nemeth]

[incomprehensible (not necessarily wrong!) stuff about polynomials,
 rings, modules over Z and complaints about the current prelude nuked]

--- Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk pisze ---

> Please show a concrete proposal how Prelude classes could be improved.

--- Jerzy Karczmarczuk repondre ---

> I am Haskell USER. I have no ambition to save the world. The "proposal"
> has been presented in 1995 in Nijmegen (FP in education). Actually, it
> hasn't, I concentrated on lazy power series etc., and the math oriented
> prelude has been mentioned casually. Jeroen Fokker presented similar
> ideas, implemented differently. 

I'm afraid all this discussion reminds me the one we had a year or two
ago. At that time the mathematically inclined side was lead by Sergei,
who to his credit developed the Basic Algebra Proposal, which I don't
understand, but many people seemed to be happy about at that time. And
then of course nothing happend, because no haskell implementor has
bitten the bullet and implemented the proposal. This is something
understandable as supporting Sergei's proposal seem to be a lot of
work, most of which would be incompatible with current
implementations. And noone wants to maintain *two* haskell compilers
within one.

Even if this discussion continues and another brave soul develops
another algebra proposal I am prepared to bet with both of you in one
years supply of Ben and Jerry's (not Jerzy :)!) icecream that nothing
will continue to happen on the implementors side. It is simply too
much work for an *untested* (in practice, for teaching etc)
alternative prelude.

So instead of wasting time, why don't you guys ask the implementors to
provide a flag '-IDontWantYourStinkingPrelude' which would give you a
bare metal compiler with no predefined types, functions, classes, no
derived instances, no fancy stuff and build and test your proposals
with it?

I guess the RULES pragma (in GHC) could be abused to allow access to
the primitive operations (on Ints), but you are still likely to loose
much of the elegance, conciseness and perhaps even some efficiency of
Haskell (e.g. list comprehensions), but this should allow us to gain
experience in what sort of support is essential for providing
alternative prelude(s). Once we learnt how to decouple the prelude
from the compiler, and gained experience with alternative preludes
implementors would have no excuse not to provide the possibility
(unless it turns out to be completely impossible or impractical, in
which case we learnt something genuinely useful).

So, Marcin (as you are one of the GHC implementors), how much work
would it be do disable the disputed Prelude stuff within the compiler,
and what would be lost?

Laszlo

[Disclaimer: Just my 10 wons. This message is not in disagreement or
             agreement with any of the previous messages]