Scope of committee (can we do *new* things?)

[Iavor Diatchki]

I disagree that we should be standardizing language features that have not
been implemented.

I think having an implementation is important because:
   1. the act of implementing a feature forces you to work out details that
you may not have thought of ahead of time.  For example, for a small
syntactic extension, the implementation would have to work out how to fit
it in the grammar, and how to present the new feature in, say, error
messages.
   2. having an implementation allows users to try out the extension and
gain some empirical evidence that the extension is actually useful in
practice (this is hard to quantify, I know, but it is even harder if you
can't even use the extension at all).

If some feature ends up being particularly useful, it could always be
standardized in the next iteration of the language, when we've gained some
experience using it in practice.

-Iavor



On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 11:17 AM, John Wiegley <johnw at newartisans.com>
wrote:

> >>>>> Gershom B <gershomb at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > While such changes should definitely be in scope, I do think that the
> proper
> > mechanism would be to garner enough interest to get a patch into GHC
> > (whether through discussion on the -prime list or elsewhere) and have an
> > experimental implementation, even for syntax changes, before such
> proposals
> > are considered ready for acceptance into a standard as such.
>
> Just a side note: This is often how the C++ committee proceeds as well: a
> language proposal with an experimental implementation is given much higher
> credence than paperware. However, they don't exclude paperware either.
>
> So I don't think we need to rely on implementation before considering a
> feature we all want, but I do agree that seeing a patch in GHC first allows
> for much testing and experimentation.
>
> --
> John Wiegley                  GPG fingerprint = 4710 CF98 AF9B 327B B80F
> http://newartisans.com                          60E1 46C4 BD1A 7AC1 4BA2
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