[Haskell] Weaving the Web with Haskell

[Malcolm Wallace]

Graham Klyne <gk at ninebynine.org> writes:

> I'd like to see this become part of the standard libraries, when it becomes 
> sufficiently stable and portable.

As far as I can see, there are three (relatively minor) problems
with the HXmlToolkit that would currently prevent it becoming part
of the standard libraries.  (1) It does not use the hierarchical
namespace. (2) It relies on obsolete hslibs packages.  (2) It is not
portable across compilers.

On a tangentially related point, portability of several of the existing
standard hierarchical libraries is rather patchy too.  For instance,
the main reason that nhc98 does not currently ship with System.Time
from the base package, or any of the network or unix packages, is that
the checked-in implementations have a tool-dependency on hsc2hs.
(The latter does not appear to have a stand-alone distribution
independent of ghc, so it would be necessary to incorporate it into the
nhc98 tree, and I don't currently have the time available to untangle
hsc2hs's configuration and build system and re-tangle it for nhc98.)

I guess I'm with Sigbjorn on wanting to reduce the number of tool
dependencies, even though I happen to like GreenCard and hsc2hs
for what they can automate.  Or perhaps, rather than reducing the
dependencies, I want to reduce their impact, by making the tools much
easier to get hold of, configure, and install.

Regards,
    Malcolm