Status of Haskell Prime Language definition

[apfelmus]

Robert Will wrote:
> Could someone please summarize the current status and planned time
> line for Haskell'?

John Launchbury wrote:
> Up to now, the Haskell' effort has been mostly about exploring the 
> possibilities, to find out what could be in Haskell', and to scope out 
> what it might mean. We've now reached the stage where we want to do the 
> opposite, namely trying to pin down what we definitely want to have in 
> the standard, and what it should look like in detail.

There's still a major technical obstacle, namely  functional 
dependencies  vs  associated type synonyms . Some functionality for 
programming in the type system is needed for Haskell' but fundeps are 
too tricky to get powerful and sound at the same time. The problem with 
their promising alternative of associated type synonyms is that they're 
very young with their first official release being the upcoming GHC 6.8 
. So, they have to stand some test of time before Haskell' can pick one 
of the two (probably the latter).

Regards,
apfelmus