Haskell 2010: libraries

[Sittampalam, Ganesh]

Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> Hello Ganesh,
> 
> Tuesday, July 14, 2009, 11:59:00 AM, you wrote:
> 
>>>> I don't have any strong opinion about whether there should be a
>>>> library standard or not, but if there is a standard, how about
>>>> putting the entire thing (perhaps including the Prelude) under the
>>>> prefix Haskell2010. or similar? Most of it could be implemented by
>>>> just re-exporting things from the "real" libraries.
>>> 
>>> we already have PvP mechanism for these things
> 
>> The PvP isn't (proposed as) part of the standard, and without package
>> qualified imports as implemented by GHC, it wouldn't help anyway.
> 
> but package versioning implemented by ghc, hugs and probably other
> compilers.

Do you mean the syntax that allows modules to be imported from a
specified package? If so I didn't realise this was implemented by
anything more than GHC.

>  with your idea we will have two things that address the
> same problem,

Arguably it is the ability to import from a specified package that
duplicates the disambiguation mechanism provided by module names.

> and these will be miltiplied - i.e. we will carry
> several versions of base package, each having Haskell2010.*,
> Haskell2011.* and so on modules   

I'd expect the Haskell2010.* etc to be implemented in a haskell2010
package which depends on the relevant version of base. Obviously it
would need to be updated when base was changed incompatibly.

Having a library standard implies that implementations must support it
for some period of time. I don't see why namespacing the libraries of
that standard makes that any harder.

Cheers,

Ganesh


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