[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] Top Level <-

[Aaron Denney]

On 2008-08-28, Yitzchak Gale <gale at sefer.org> wrote:
> However we work that out, right now we need a working
> idiom to get out of trouble when this situation comes up.
> What we have is a hack that is not guaranteed to work.
> We are abusing the NOINLINE pragma and assuming
> things about it that are not part of its intended use.
> We are lucky that it happens to work right now in GHC.
>
> So my proposal is that, right now, we make the simple
> temporary fix of adding an ONLYONCE pragma that does
> have the proper guaranteed sematics.
>
> In the meantime, we can keep tackling the awkward squad.

What keeps this a "temporary fix".  Even now, industrial user demands
keep us from making radical changes to the languages and libraries.  If
we adopt a not entirely satisfactory solution, it's never going away.
If we keep the NOINLINE pragma hack, we can claim it was never supported
and do away with it.  If we don't have a real solution, perhaps in this
case we haven't worn the hair shirt long enough?

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-