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

[Sebastian Sylvan]

On 10/13/05, Simon Marlow <simonmar at microsoft.com> wrote:
> On 12 October 2005 23:50, Sebastian Sylvan wrote:
>
> > (I'm specifically interested in seeing SPJ's records proposal
> > included, and a new module system).
>
> Highly unlikely, IMHO.  A new revision of the Haskell standard is not
> the place for testing new research, rather it's a clear specification of
> existing well-understood language features.
>

I can certainly understand this point of view. I am (as primarily a
user and not a language designer) perhaps too eager to get my hands on
cool new stuff :-)

> If you want a new record system, or a new module system, now is the time
> to start designing and implementing them ready for the next
> standardisation process.

Okay then. Consider this my contribution to the discussion.
First of all I would like to urge the people who do end up working on
this to seriously consider replacing H98's records system. I may be
wrong but the impression I get is that enough people dislike the
current system enough to warrant a replacement. And to me it seems to
be a pretty much "slam-dunk" case that the proposal is *a lot* better
than what we current have.

On the module system.
You may consider this a proposal. There have been discussions on this
mailing lists about it but let me recap the main gist of it.
Conservatively extend the current ghc hierarchical module system by
allowing you to re-export modules "qualified". So you could write

module GTK (..., qualified module GTK.Button as Button, ...) where

Then the user could just import GTK and get all of the contents of
GTK.Button imported qualifed as Button automatically.

This allow libraries written using the current hierarchcical system to
work without any changes, while new libraries can use the new feature
(I'm guessing GTK2HS would benefit a lot from this, getting rid of all
the ugly "buttonNew"-style functions).

/S

--
Sebastian Sylvan
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