[Haskell-cafe] Haskell philosophy question

[Yaakov Nemoy]

2009/5/17 Vasili I. Galchin <vigalchin at gmail.com>:
> Hello,
>
>      I am confused between Haskell as delineated in the Haskell Report VS
> ghc "pragmas" which extend Haskell beyond the Haskell Report. I am sure I am
> not the first to ask. Caveat: on my part, I am not against
> innovation/extensions, but I don't like to see language "bloat". This is not
> a negative/pegorative statement .... just a challenging one.

Let's say that pragmas strong type your code. With the Haskell Report,
you can parse a string into a certain block of code which does some
kind of functionality. With these, you will get a different type that
does prett ymuch the same thing. But these advanced types can also
handle certain other tricks too. The philosophy is to use the pragmas
then, as declarations so you know which parser to use, etc... It also
lets people pass around blocks of data and know what to do with it,
rather than relying on simple version numbers.

Languages do pick up features all the time. If you're looking for a
different perspective, it lets us strictly sort the extensions rather
than relying on vague notions such as version number, 'from __future__
import *' (from python) or any of the other weird things you get when
there are multiple revisions of a single language spec. In essence
it's not that the language is any more bloated than what is normal, or
you would still be using KR C to get your work done, because you were
afraid of bloat.

-Yaakov Nemoy