[Haskell-cafe] Re: Interest in helping w/ Haskell standard

[Bayley, Alistair]

> From: Stephane Bortzmeyer [mailto:bortzmeyer at nic.fr] 
> 
> As someone who is not an academic researcher and not a student in CS,
> I would like to express a personal opinion; we don't need a new
> standard. To me, Haskell needs more libraries, more users (which means
> more debugging and more documentations), more implementations, of
> course more real applications (darcs did a lot of the success of
> Haskell), so we can read their code, push sysadmins to install
> Haskell, etc.

A significant number of Haskell libraries, both user-contributed and
compiler-bundled (in the "standard" library hierarchy), are not written in
Haskell98, and rely on a number of (typically well supported) language
extensions like multi-parameter type classes + functional dependencies,
existential types, hierarchical modules, etc. Some libraries target a
specific compiler (often GHC).

It should be clear that standardising the popular extensions would make a
greater number of compiler-bundled and user-contributed libraries standards
compliant, which has the obvious benefit that they can be used with any
standardised compiler/interpreter i.e. they become more portable.

Alistair.

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