[Haskell] Announcing the new Haskell Prime process, and Haskell 2010

[Simon Marlow]

At last year's Haskell Symposium, it was announced that we would change 
the Haskell Prime process to make it less monolithic.  Since then, 
everyone has been busy using Haskell (or implementing it), and we 
haven't made much progress on the standardisation side of things.  Well, 
with ICFP and the Haskell Symposium approaching we felt it was time to 
get the new process moving and hopefully produce a language revision 
this year.

I've updated the Haskell' wiki with the new information; in particular 
the process is documented here:

   http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/Process

We're aiming to announce the list of accepted proposals at the Haskell 
Symposium this year.  However, owing to the short timescale, the list is 
going to be correspondingly short, and limited to extensions which are 
either already fully specified (i.e. the FFI) or are small and 
well-understood.  The following list is very provisional; we'll be 
making the final decisions next month.

ForeignFunctionInterface
LineCommentSyntax
PatternGuards
DoAndIfThenElse
Remove n+k patterns
RelaxedDependencyAnalysis
EmptyDataDeclarations
HierarchicalModules
NonDecreasingIndentation
remove FixityResolution from the context-free grammar
change the syntax of QualifiedOperators

In the coming weeks we'll be refining proposals in preparation for 
Haskell 2010.  By all means suggest more possibilities; however note 
that as per the new process, a proposal must be "complete" (i.e. in the 
form of an addendum) in order to be a candidate for acceptance.

I have updated the status page

   http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/Status

marking everything except the proposals that have been already 
implemented in the draft Report as "old".  The new process requires a 
proposal to have an owner or owners in order to make progress; once a 
proposal has an owner it will move into the "under discussion" state. To 
take up ownership of an existing proposal, or to start a new proposal, 
ask on the mailing list.  There are other ways you can get involved; 
some suggestions are on the Haskell' main page:

   http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki

(hmm, I suppose we should fix that logo too...)

Cheers,
	Simon