[Haskell-cafe] Foo.Bar.hs filenames poll

William Yager will.yager at gmail.com
Mon Dec 19 22:22:15 UTC 2016


On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 2:22 PM, MarLinn via Haskell-Cafe <
haskell-cafe at haskell.org> wrote:

> If we want our language to remain extensible and at the forefront of
> language development, we can't tie down too many parts.


I think this is an excellent point. One of the distinguishing features of
Haskell is that, as a language, it makes almost no concessions to the
underlying architecture on which it is compiled or eventually run (and,
impressively, manages to achieve very good performance and usability
anyway!).

Haskell, among all production languages, is perhaps the only one that would
be equally at home on some sort of alien lambda-machine as it would on an
x86 processor (i.e. not very, but Haskell's foundations are solid enough
that we could make it work well).

More practically, one could imagine that someone might like to use Haskell
as e.g. some sort of cloud-based scripting language where the notion of a
filesystem hierarchy doesn't make a lot of sense.

There's no good reason to force the language to adhere to something as
arbitrary or restricted as a traditional filesystem hierarchy. "Modules"
are a much more general concept than files on a disk, and it would be a
mistake to over-specify them.

Cheers,
Will
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