[Haskell-cafe] Re: Rewriting a famous library and using the same name: pros and cons

[Daniel Fischer]

On Tuesday 06 July 2010 07:04:18, wren ng thornton wrote:
> Cabal has a partial listing embedded in its code, though I can't seem to
> find a textual version at the moment. In general, Hugs has all the
> features of GHC 6.6: FFI, CPP, MPTCs, FunDeps, OverlappingInstances,...
> I'm forgetting off-hand whether it has Rank2Types/RankNTypes, but I
> think so. The one notable difference between Hugs and GHC6.6 is that it
> does not have IncoherentInstances, and instead supports a
> different/incompatible way of trying to solve that problem.

Another notable difference are BangPatterns.

>
> Of course, since it's GHC6.6-era that means it doesn't support LANGUAGE
> pragma to enable these features. The -98 flag enables most of the
> extensions with separate flags for OverlappingInstances,
> Not-IncoherentInstances, and CPP (or any other preprocessor); and in
> order to use the FFI you must first run ffihugs in order to compile the
> bindings. Because the shift from GHC6.6 to GHC6.8 was so significant,
> it'd be nice if someone put out a maintenance version of Hugs which adds
> support for LANGUAGE pragma and similar compilation interface issues,
> even if the underlying code base remains the same. One can dream, eh?

If support for BangPatterns could be added, that would be very convenient.
Of course you can do it with seq, but BangPatterns are, well, very 
convenient compared to seq.
Of course my plea for BangPatterns extends to JHC/UHC etc.

>
> > Definitely serious: if anything, I would care more about ensuring
> > compatability with JHC, UHC, etc. than Hugs nowadays.
>
> Certainly JHC and UHC should be targeted for compatibility. However,
> doing so seems unlikely to come at the cost of compatibility with Hugs.
> Hugs implements H98 along with the most venerable and widely used
> extensions. Consequently, the language Hugs understands happens to be
> the same one that's the goal of modern Haskell compilers like JHC and
> UHC. However little maintenance Hugs is getting, it captures all of
> "classic Haskell". The hallmarks of "new Haskell" like GADTs and type
> functions are, so far as I'm aware, considered a more distant goal for
> alternative compilers.