Haskell 2010: libraries

[Alexander Dunlap]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 5:15 AM, Brandon S. Allbery
KF8NH<allbery at ece.cmu.edu> wrote:
> On Jul 8, 2009, at 17:55 , Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 03:09:29PM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
>>>>
>>>> 1. Just drop the whole libraries section from the report.  The
>>>>   Report will still define the Prelude, however.
>>>>
>>>> I'm tending towards (1), mainly because it provides a clean break and is
>>>> likely to be the least confusing for users: they have one place to go
>>>> looking for library documentation.
>>
>> instead, ghc bundled libs say it, replaced now by Haskell Platform libs.
>> but these are de-facto standards, and i think that Report should support
>> it by defining the same set as standard de-jure
>
>
> Perhaps the real answer is that the Report should bless the Haskell Platform
> - not any specific version of it.  It occurs to me that the dependency might
> actually go the other way:  a Haskell Platform release specifies which
> versions of the Haskell standard it complies with.  (Including H98.)
>
> --
> brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
> system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
> electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH

I agree with this. The goal of the HP is that users are able to say
"this package works with HP version X." The Platform should be the
central compatibility point, and it should specify the version of the
language used in the platform. I think there is an advantage to having
just one compatibility layer to track (i.e. the Platform). If the
Report specified a version of the Platform, but the Report were only
offered half as often as the Platform, then we would get a weird
situation with some HP releases being "report-blessed" and some not
included in the report at all.

Alex