[Haskell-cafe] Updating the Haskell Standard

[John Goerzen]

There was a brief discussion on #haskell today about the Haskell
standard.  I'd like to get opinions from more people, and ask if there
is any effort being done in this direction presently.

I think an updated standard is overdue.  I find it difficult anymore to
write any but the most trivial of programs using pure Haskell 98.  Some
notable, and widely-used, features developed since then include:

 * Overlapping instances

 * FFI

 * Hierarchical namespace

 * Undecidable instances

 * All sorts of updates to the standard library

It has been awhile since I wrote a Haskell program that can compile in
pure Haskell 98 mode.  I think it would benefit everyone if a more
up-to-date standard were made available.

I know that some people would like to hold off on such a process until
their favorite feature (we'll call it feature X) is finished.  I would
argue that incremental addendums to the standard should be made more
frequently, so that new features can be standardized more easily.

Thoughts?

Who organized the standardization effort last time?