[Haskell-cafe] Backward compatibility

[Edward Kmett]

"Tantamount to a new language" to fix a minor detail in a typeclass
hierarchy? That is just histrionic. *No* language is that stable.

Scala makes dozens of changes like that between *minor* versions, and while
I hardly hold up their development practices as the best in the industry it
is still somehow seen as enterprise ready.

-Edward



On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 6:52 AM, Adrian May
<adrian.alexander.may 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.
>
>
> I think that should be fixed as well, but it would be tantamount to a new
> language.
>
> I guess you need some kind of versioning system for the libraries. Why not
> put them all in a public source control server and have ghc force people to
> say which snapshot they wanted. That would be your final breaking change,
> and it's a one-liner in the Makefile. Then you could thrash around as much
> as you liked and people like me would have nothing to complain about.
> Naturally, the compiler itself should keep supporting old modes.
>
> Adrian.
>
>
>
>>
>>
>> ______________________________**_________________
>> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
>> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
>> http://www.haskell.org/**mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe<http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe>
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20130503/0e78d2bb/attachment.htm>