Reform of the Monad, and Disruptive Change

[Roman Leshchinskiy]

On 04/02/2011, at 10:08, Malcolm Wallace wrote:

> I suggested, and several people +1'd, that if we are making disruptive changes to the standard libraries defined in the Language Report (especially the Prelude), then we should aim to make a thorough job of cleaning up all the cruft and redesigning in a single strike.  This means not just rearranging the Monad hierarchy, but looking at I/O types, exceptions, the default strictness of foldl, and much much more.

Is there a list of known issues for the standard libraries somewhere? Would it perhaps make sense to create a design bug tracker for them?

> Then (for instance) ghc could make a major release with the refreshed libraries, and after a little experience in the field (and perhaps a few patches), the libraries would then proceed to be blessed as part of the subsequent language standard.

Perhaps GHC could be released with two sets of libraries. This would give people time to experiment without breaking existing code. It would also make implementing individual changes much easier.

Roman