Announcing the new Haskell Prime process, and Haskell 2010

[Simon Marlow]

On 07/07/2009 15:27, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> Tuesday, July 7, 2009, 6:04:46 PM, you wrote:
>
> i can't understand. does this list supposed to be full list of changes
> in haskell'? it seems to include mainly supplementary syntax changes
> while even Rank2Types are not here, the same for assoc. types, GADTs
> and other fundamental type system improvements

Perhaps you didn't read the Process page?  This is the list of changes 
that are provisionally in Haskell 2010.  Haskell' is an ongoing process, 
producing a new revision every year.

The reason that many extensions are not ready to be in the standard is 
that they haven't been formally specified; indeed, many of them are 
still changing (e.g. GADTs).

> and btw - from my user's POV, we can just start with common GHC&  Hugs
> subset, remove a few features, add a few GHC-specific features and
> will become close to what should be named next Haskell standard,
> standard de-facto of Haskell used in last years. why so much time spent
> on this process..

For the language standard, we need to be absolutely precise about what 
each extension to the language means.  Most of the extensions that GHC 
implements are barely specified at all.  How would you go about 
implementing, say, scoped type variables in another Haskell compiler?

Cheers,
	Simon