Special Invitation :-) HC&A Report (November 2003) (fwd)

[Graham Klyne]

At 11:44 27/10/03 -0800, Iavor S. Diatchki wrote:
>    1.  at what point should we remove the Unstable.* name, i.e. does 
> anyone have any criteria besides "it seems to work"?
>
>most software these days seems to be distributed on this basis, so perhaps 
>we should adapt this as well.
>i don't have time to prove the corectness of the monad library, but it 
>seems to work.  i can't gurantee that
>there are no bugs, and i don't think we should freeze its interface as 
>soon as the Unstable.* bit is removed
>(especially for some of the newer transformers).  i think "releasing" the 
>library is a good idea as it will give
>more people the opportunity to use it, hence find bugs in the 
>implementation or the interface.

In the area of network protocol design, a touchstone often used is some 
variant of "two interoperable implementations"  (e.g. the "running code" 
leg of "rough consensus and running code").

Maybe a comparable criterion for library code might relate to its use in 
real, complete applications?

#g


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Graham Klyne
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