Fran and HGL broken with Feb 2001 Hugs

[C.Reinke]

Alastair wrote:
> As you and others have found, my HGL and Conal's Fran both depend on internal
> details of Hugs which were changed in the latest release. 

Dear all (and especially Hugs maintainers),

it is not too nice if libraries have to depend on internal details of the Hugs
distribution, but I assume they wouldn't if their author's had known any way
around this.  And, given that several very popular libraries were affected
seriously by the latest release of Hugs, may I suggest that those libraries are
added to the test-suite for Hugs? 

It is just too risky to hope that all library authors will test their (in some
cases several years old) libraries whenever any of the Haskell implementations
gets updated, so this would better be automated (as, I believe, it is for GHC).
It cannot be the task of the Hugs maintainers to fix the libraries in the test
suite if they break due to a change to Hugs internals (*), but neither should a
new release of Hugs come out with all those widely used libraries broken. 

In other words, new releases of Hugs could be tested against the suite and any
problems encountered could be fixed "behind the scenes" before the releases
reach the general public. In the worst case, if no easy fixes can be found, a
decision would have to be made between breaking all those popular libraries and
not introducing some potentially useful new features.

In case anyone wonders: here in Canterbury, as soon as the first of us found
only one of those libraries broken, a warning went round not to use the new
Hugs for the time being, and that early adopter had to try and restore his old
Hugs environment..(**) No-one here is using the new release! And I know of
other fp places following the same cautious approach, waiting for the situation
to stabilize instead of risking their research and teaching (!!!) environments.

Just some thoughts of a Hugs+libraries fan,

Claus

(*) Btw, what was the rationale for that change? Was it really necessary?

(**) no, it wasn't me, but I agree. I needed to have a look at the new built-in
    Observe stuff, and I had been hoping for the new FFI stuff, but not at the
    risk of so seriously upsetting my Hugs enviroment, so I only downloaded the
    source release and kept my old Hugs installation.