Compiler versions

[Andy Moran]

On Wednesday 07 April 2004 12:54 pm, Jon Cast wrote:
> Malcolm Wallace <Malcolm.Wallace at cs.york.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> > I remember Mark Jones suggesting more-or-less exactly this idea back
> > in about 1998/1999.  It has been implemented in nhc98 ever since, but
> > I finally deleted it from CVS recently because no other systems
> > supported it.  And (probably the more major reason) because I
> > frequently forgot to keep it up to date.  Here was the signature:
> >
> >     module Haskell where
> >
> >     import Time
> >     import Locale
> >
> >     systemName     :: String        -- "Hugs", "GHC", "hbc", "nhc",
> > "qhc", .. .
> >     haskellVersion :: Int           -- 13, 14, 98, 2000, ...
>
>       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> I wholeheartedly endorse this, but these days I think (Version,
> [String]) would be a better type, i.e., (haskell98, ["Standard FFI",
> "Multi-parameter type classes", "Functional Dependencies", ...].
> Knowing the Haskell version number by itself won't be much good until
> the Haskell 2.0 standard, but knowing which extensions are present
> (independent of the compiler version) would be a very good thing
> (listing syntactic extensions isn't an entirely useless thing; I'm sure
> it would make Autoconf's job easier).
>
> >     releaseDate    :: CalendarTime  -- ...
> >     version        :: String        -- some combination of the above

Why not have a record encoding the major/minor version number, stability, 
extensions, etc.?

-- 
Andy Moran                                         Ph. (503) 626 6616, x113
Galois Connections Inc.                                 Fax. (503) 350 0833
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