Haskell 2010: libraries

[Simon Marlow]

On 09/07/2009 13:26, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> Hello Simon,
>
> Thursday, July 9, 2009, 3:46:31 PM, you wrote:
>
>> This would be a bold step, in that we would be effectively standardising
>> a lot more libraries than the current language standard.  The base
>> package is a fairly random bag of library modules, for instance.  It
>
> The base library is under the question, but remaining libs of ghc/HP
> are in rather good shape
>
> of course, without base we can't do even i/o, so questions still
> remains. in particular, you plan to do something with base in 6.12
> although it was not yet decided what exactly
>
> so these two discussions (what to do with libs in 6.12 and what to do
> with libs in Report) may go together
>
> ideally, we would split base into smaller and versionable packages. at
> least in form of interfaces, while implementations will just import
> everything from base

I feel this discussion is widening a bit too far.

The question at hand is how to make the Haskell 2010 Report 
self-consistent, avoid confusing users, and avoid perpetuating obsolete 
libraries.  The Haskell Report doesn't have to specify libraries, it is 
not supposed to be a complete specification of the Haskell universe, it 
is a specification of the language.

Remember that we're talking here about a *standard*.  The Haskell 
Platform libraries, while being a hugely useful resource, are not 
specified to the level of precision we would expect for a Haskell 
standard.  Neither have they undergone the level of scrutiny that we 
would ideally subject libraries to.  So we can't just throw all this 
stuff in the standard and say "done!".

Cheers,
	Simon