[Haskell-cafe] Backward compatibility

[Ozgur Akgun]

Hi,

On 3 May 2013 11:43, Tobias Dammers <tdammers at gmail.com> wrote:

> > PS The proposal to fix Functor => Applicative => Monad has patches
> > attached for GHC and base, but the backwards compatibility bogeyman
> > always seems to trump something that will break a lot of code.
>
> This kind of "breaks everything" changes would require something similar
> to what Python is doing with the 2 -> 3 transition, and considering how
> painfully slowly it is progressing there, I understand perfectly well why
> people don't want to go there.
>

There is one very big advantage in the Haskell-world though.
Most of the struggle will be at the compile time. The biggest headache
caused by
the Python 2 -> 3 transition is how you get a runtime error 2 weeks after
you think
you've fixed everything!

(Yeah, I know code coverage analysis is an option when you don't have static
type checking, but ...)

Cheers,
Ozgur
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