[Haskell-cafe] Re: Interesting critique of Haskell

[David Roundy]

On Fri, May 09, 2008 at 11:35:32AM -0400, Brent Yorgey wrote:
> On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 10:02 AM, Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>
> wrote:
> > While I'm here - I'm aware of how you control importing [or not] from the
> > Prelude. Is there a way that I can, for example, import all the stuff like
> > the basic types, classes, etc., but *not* all the list-related stuff? Or is
> > the Prelude not that modular?
> 
> Not only is the Prelude not that modular, there's not really any mechanism
> to make it so.  There's no way to partition an export list in such a way
> that whole chunks of it can be imported/not imported at a go.  Would that be
> a nice feature?  I don't know, possibly.

Ordinary functions are easily split off from the Prelude.  The only tricky
bit is classes and class instances, and that's a Hard Problem, as far as I
can tell.  And, of course, "only" is quite an understatement here.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University