[Haskell-cafe] Re: Versioning

Brian Hulley brianh at metamilk.com
Thu Dec 21 12:23:58 EST 2006


Lennart Augustsson wrote:
> On Dec 21, 2006, at 15:53 , Neil Mitchell wrote:
>
>> Hi
>>
>>> there are really no choices for real development. many libraries,
>>> language
>>> extensions and techniques are for ghc only
>>
>> I develop everything in Hugs, including the Yhc compiler itself. Hugs
>> is great. There are lots of extensions in GHC, but Haskell 98 is a
>> perfectly useable language!
>>
>
> I must second this opinion.  There's this (false) perception that you
> need all
> kinds of extensions to make Haskell usable.  It's simply not true.
> Certain
> extensions can make your life easier, but that's it.

Well, FingerTrees for example, require MPTCs as in

    pushL :: Measured v a => a -> FingerTree v a -> FingerTree v a

For any kind of object oriented programming you need existentials to 
separate the interface from the different concrete objects. Also in the code 
I've written I've often needed higher rank polymorphism and scoped type 
variables. Sure it's possible to use all kinds of horrific hacks to try and 
avoid the need for scoped type variables etc but why would anyone waste 
their time writing difficult obfuscated code when GHC has the perfect 
solution all ready to use.

In other words, what on earth is good about gluing oneself to Haskell98? 
Life's moved on...

Best regards, Brian.
-- 
http://www.metamilk.com 



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