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

[Claus Reinke]

> At last year's Haskell Symposium, it was announced that we would change 
> the Haskell Prime process to make it less monolithic. 
> ..
> In the coming weeks we'll be refining proposals in preparation for 
> Haskell 2010. 

Given the incremental nature of the new standards, would it be
useful to switch back to version numbers, eg "Haskell 2.0.0 (2010)"
instead of "Haskell 2010"? Otherwise, we'll end up with half a
dozen more or less current Haskells related by no obvious means.
"Haskell'98" was chosen because it projected more permanence
than the Haskell 1.x line of Haskell revisions that came before it.

Having API instead of date encoded in the name would support
deprecations, breaking changes, or additions as well as make it 
clear whether a new year's version does break anything or not.

Btw, once upon a time, there was a discussion about an even
more modular approach, standardising language extensions
without saying which extensions made up a standard language.
That would give support to the status quo, where people want
to use, say, Haskell'98+FFI+Hierarchical Modules+MPTC+..

In other words, existing language extensions (LANGUAGE
pragmas) ought to be standardized (currently, they mean different
things in different implementations), independent of whether
or not the committee decides to group them into a Haskell X.

Claus