[Haskell-cafe] Re: The instability of Haskell libraries

[Christopher Lane Hinson]

On Tue, 27 Apr 2010, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:

>> I despair that a better Numeric hierarchy will never make it into
>> Haskell.
>
>
> I thought the main reason for that was that nobody could agree on a "better" 
> hierarchy that was actually usable.  (Nobody wants to chain 10 typeclasses 
> together to get work done.)

I think that there is a way to do this so that everyone can be happy, if hassled.

But GHC already has what we need to define our own numeric preludes.  What we don't have is any numeric prelude at all.  We just have a prelude prelude.  I think it would *really* help if we could break the Prelude down into component packages, that can be separately imported, so that we don't have nonsense like this:

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/list-extras/latest/doc/html/Prelude-Listless.html

And such a thing could be done without breaking any code -- each compiler already has it's own non-standard breakdown anyway.

Friendly,
--Lane