Application letters at the Haskell workshop: suggestion

[Lennart Augustsson]

brk@jenkon.com wrote:

> Thanks, that's very valuable information. It's hard to appreciate the
> relative utility (as you can see :-)) of different experimental features.
>
> It's also confusing that things like exceptions, concurrency, and FFI are
> labeled 'experimental'. They're so (IMHO) crucial that I find myself saying,
> "Okay, if exceptions are 'experimental', what other really important things
> might I be missing by not being familiar with all the experimental
> extensions?" Thanks for clearing that up somewhat.

I have been writing substantial Haskell programs and I use *NO* experimental
features.  What I'm currently working on is over 20000 lines of Haskell 98.
No extensions whatsoever.  (It even compiles and runs with all available
Haskell implementations.)
Granted, I write mostly compiler like programs (files in, files out), but there
is still a lot you can do in Haskell just as it is.  Sometimes it might require
bending slightly backwards to get it done, though.

    -- Lennart

PS. OK, a small confession, that program contains one unsafePerformIO for
performance reasons.  It works fine without it, but 5% slower.