[Haskell-cafe] Updating the Haskell Standard

[Sam Goldman]

(oops, forgot to cc to the list)

Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
 > Hello John,
 >
 > Wednesday, July 20, 2005, 10:14:23 PM, you wrote:
 >
 > JG> It has been awhile since I wrote a Haskell program that can 
compile in
 > JG> pure Haskell 98 mode.  I think it would benefit everyone if a more
 > JG> up-to-date standard were made available.
 >
 > imho, there is an unofficial standard made by common GHC/Hugs
 > features. afaik, other two Haskell compilers are not evolve any more.
 > so that really you want to standartize? :)  i think, the
 > standartization process will help only in situations when there is
 > several fast-grown and uncompatible realizations

Standardizing now-extensions to Haskell will let them permeate through
the entire standard library. The hardest part in the standardization
process wouldn't be choosing _what_ to include, but researching the
effects on the current Haskell implementation itself.

 > question in that i really agree - that documentation about all
 > extra-Haskell98 features are spread here and there. it will be great
 > if we will add, for example, addendum to "gentle introduction" where
 > new language features and libs will be covered. of course, much of
 > this can be borrowed from Hugs/GHC docs and articles, written by its
 > developers

I think it would be a good idea to take this page
(http://haskell.org/hawiki/HaskellTwo) and, ignoring the "definitely,"
"possibly," etc., make sure that all the extensions people want in go to
pages which are written in a Gentle Introduction-kind of way.

- Sam (first post)