important news: refocusing discussion

[Ross Paterson]

On Fri, Mar 24, 2006 at 11:30:57AM -0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
> So I believe the issue is mainly one of perspective.  Until I wrote this
> email I hadn't thought of (4) and my preference was for (2), but now I
> quite like the idea of (4).  We would include concurrency in Haskell',
> but provide a separate addendum that specifies how imlementations that
> don't provide concurrency should behave.  One advantage of (4) over (3)
> is that we can unambiguously claim that Haskell' has concurrencey.

And we can unambiguously state that there is only one Haskell'
implementation (though a second is on the way).

Sure, concurrency is essential to many applications, and should be
precisely specified.  But it is also irrelevant to a lot of uses of
Haskell (except for ensuring that one's libraries are also usable on
concurrent implementations, as JohnM said).  A specification of the
language without concurrency would be at least as valuable (having more
implementations).  Perspective, as you say -- most people agree we need
both -- but I think you're a bit too negative about the smaller variant.