Non-H98 crusade, contd.

[Sven Panne]

Keean Schupke wrote:
> Isn't H98 a bit old now... Surely some of the common extensions are well 
> known and useful enough to be standardised... I read somewhere the 
> Haskell standards commitee has been dispanded - and that the consensus 
> of implementers would replace it.  Surely all that has to happen is the 
> ghc, hugs, nhc, (and others) get together and recognise some extensions 
> (say multi-parameter types, fundeps) as
> compliant to Haskell-2005 and we have an updated standard?

 From the discussions in recent years it is far from clear to me what would be
an accepted extension. The current type system extensions interfere with each
other and it looks like some can be emulated by others. Furthermore, nhc98
implements almost none of these extensions, but I guess Malcolm would happily
accept any volunteers. :-) Furthermore, there's still hbc, tools which operate
on Haskell sources, etc. etc. Keeping the non-H98 part of the standard libraries
low is still a worthy goal, even in 2005...

Note that I'm not against any extensions, I'd be more than happy if a new
revision of H98 would emerge, but I seriously doubt that simply declaring what
2 implementations provide as a standard is the right way to proceed. Perhaps
we should make a few more carefully selected addenda to the H98 report.

And while I'm at this topic: Shouldn't hierarchical modules be promoted to an
official, finalised addendum? There hasn't been much dispute about this topic
in the last few years... :-)

Cheers,
    S.