[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANNOUNCE: Utrecht Haskell Compiler (UHC) --first release

[Gwern Branwen]

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Claus Reinke <claus.reinke at talk21.com> wrote:
...
> joking and bikeshedding aside:
>
> - Haskell'98 is a fixed standard. Haskell'98 (revised) is a revised version
> of
>   the same standard. The discussion on what is in either is over. Unless
> someone wants to start and edit a new revision of Haskell'98. Or someone
>   wants to write about experience with and criticism of the existing
> standards.
>   None of which seems to relate to this thread's subject, though either
> would
>   fit into other threads on this mailing list.
>
> - the UHC announcement states (emphasis added): "UHC supports   _almost all_
> Haskell98 features plus many experimental extensions".
>   Once they start claiming to have a full Haskell'98 implementation,
>   everybody can start filing bug reports. Actually, you can start doing
>   that now as they explicitly relate UHC to Haskell'98, not Haskell,
>   not Haskell'. But once you've filed a bug report about a deviation
>   from the version of the standard being referred to, it is up to them.
>
> - there are one or two more interesting things to discuss about UHC.
>   That would require some actual work to find out more about it.
>
> - implementing a Haskell compiler requires a lot of work. So does
>   detailing language extensions, to say nothing about providing   supporting
> evidence for suggested language extensions by   actually implementing them
> side-by-side with Haskell's other
>   features.
> - anyone who gets through the work of implementing something,
>   let alone a Haskell compiler, to the stage of releasing/announcing
>   it, is likely looking forward to getting feedback on their work.
>
>   In reality, the only feedback most projects get is from bug reports
>   (and not always those), web access logs, and rumours on blogs
>   or irc. One really, really, does not need one's project name to be   used
> for other unrelated entertainment as well.
>
> May I respectfully suggest that further postings under _this_ subject give
> something back to the UHC implementers, in the form of investing some actual
> work and time to find out about the fruits of their work?
>
> Claus

I'd like to second this email. I found the ehc/uhc project very
interesting when I was looking at it a year or two ago, and I'm a
little distressed that this thread has been so unproductive and
basically hostile. I was hoping that comments would be more
substantive, rather than carping about what a maintainer plans on
adding (and thereby triggering an apparent holy war).

For example, I expected someone to ask why it was not cabalized since
that would help distribution; to which a developer could respond that
it could well be except source files need to be preprocessed with the
grammar-conversion tool (UUAGC?) and Cabal doesn't support that like
it does alex/happy; to which someone might propose a hack-around using
GHC's -Fgetc. option, or maybe someone would go quickly add support to
Cabal and we could get started on Cabalizing the various compilers -

Er. Not to try to force the discussion in any particular direction or
anything...

-- 
gwern