GUI Library Task Force

[Ian Lynagh]

On Wed, Sep 26, 2001 at 10:59:55PM +1000, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty wrote:
> 
> Currently, there doesn't seem to be much interest in going
> for a completely new version of Haskell.  The idea of adding
> addenda to H98 and so slowly and in incremental steps move
> to more functionality seems to be more popular.

The preface of the report says

    Haskell has evolved continuously since its orignal publication.
    By the middle of 1997, there had been four versions of the
    language (the latest at that point being Haskell 1.4). At the
    1997 Haskell Workshop in Amsterdam, it was decided that a stable
    variant of Haskell was needed; this stable language is the
    subject of this Report, and is called "Haskell 98".

    Haskell 98 was conceived as a relatively minor tidy-up of Haskell
    1.4, making some simplifications, and removing some pitfalls for
    the unwary. It is intended to be a "stable" language in sense the
    implementors are committed to supporting Haskell 98 exactly as
    specified, for the foreseeable future.

I don't think this is compatible with things like adding support
for the library hierarchy with multiple dots to Haskell 98 as you
will then be able to write a program that is valid Haskell 98 by
todays definition but not yesterdays. OTOH if what you mean is
adding support incrementally to todays *tools* and declaring H98
with a set of the new features to be Haskell 2 at some point in
the future then I don't have a problem with that.

Incidentally "orignal" is spelt wrong in the first line.


Thanks
Ian