ANN: H98 FFI Addendum 1.0, Release Candidate 1

[Manuel M. T. Chakravarty]

Dear Haskell Hackers,

It is my pleasure to announce Release Candidate 1 of the
Foreign Function Interface (FFI) Addendum to Haskell 98:

  http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/ffi/

I like to invite comments on the specification, which is the
outcome of a rather long development effort (including of
course all the work on GreenCard, H/Direct etc) by a
considerable number of people and much technical discussion
on ffi@haskell.org (which you can review in the archive of
the mailing list at haskell.org if you are interested in the
gory details).

I append a short description of the idea behind H98 Addenda.

Cheers,
Manuel

-=- Haskell 98 Addenda -=-

In line with the outcome of the discussion at the last
Haskell Workshop, a number of conservative extensions to the
base language Haskell 98 in the form of addenda to the
language definition are under way.  These extensions strive
to complement the base language in areas that have not been
covered during the design of Haskell 98, but which are
perceived to be of crucial importance in some application
areas.  An effort is made to design these extensions to have
minimal impact on existing Haskell 98 programs.

The benefit of a H98 Addendum over any random language
extension provided by some Haskell implementation is that a
H98 Addendum is a standardised design, and programs coded
against such an addendum can be expected to be portable
across implementations that support this standard.
Generally, implementations of H98 are not required to
implement all H98 Addenda, but if such an implementation
does provide a feature that is covered by an addendum, it is
expected that this extension conforms to that addendum (in
the same way as it is expected to abide by the H98 language
definition).