Update on Haskell Prime reboot?

[Richard Eisenberg]

I stand by ready to debate standards and would enjoy moving this process forward. However, I'm not in a position where I can lead at the moment -- just too consumed by other tasks right now.

As a concrete suggestion, I wonder if we should have two goals:

1. Write down an updated standard for Haskell.

2. Write down pre-standards for several extensions.

About (2): I'm very sympathetic to a recent post on Haskell-cafe about having formal descriptions of language extensions. It is not our purview to document GHC. However, several extensions are in very common use, but might not be quite ready for a language standard. Chief among these, in my opinion, is GADTs. GADTs are problematic from a standardization standpoint because it's quite hard to specify when a GADT pattern-match type-checks, without resorting to discussion of unification variables. For this reason, I would be hesitant about putting GADTs in a standard. On the other hand, it shouldn't be too hard to specify some sort of minimum implementation that individual compilers can build on. I'm calling such a description a "pre-standard".

Thoughts?

Richard

On Apr 21, 2016, at 5:22 PM, José Manuel Calderón Trilla <jmct at jmct.cc> wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I'm curious if there is any progress on the reboot of the Haskell
> Prime committee. It has been six months since the closing of
> nominations and there hasn't been any word that I'm aware of. I've
> also spoken to a few others that have self-nominated and they too have
> not heard any news.
> 
> Personally, I feel that a new standard is very important for the
> future health of the community. Several threads on the mailing list
> and posts on the web, such as one on reddit today [1], show a desire
> from the community for a major consolidation effort.
> 
> If there is any way that I can help the process along I would be glad
> to do so. It would be a shame to allow for the enthusiasm for a new
> committee fade away.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> José
> 
> 
> [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/4fsuvu/can_we_have_xhaskell2016_which_turns_on_the_most/
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