Proposal: Data.Stream

[Malcolm Wallace]

Stefan O'Rear <stefanor at cox.net> wrote:

> What does Data. mean in a language where almost everything is a data
> type?

And I thought in Haskell almost everything was a function...

> I think we should move abolish that subtree entirely, moving
> the major subtrees (Binary, Generics, Array, ...) to top level, and
> creating a bunch of new categories (Numeric, Collection, etc) for the
> remaining modules.  (ByteString can go in Text)

I couldn't disagree more strongly.  _Very_ few libraries are about
providing general-purpose data structures.  The vast majority of
libraries are task-oriented: OpenGL for graphical rendering,
HaXml/HXT/pretty for document processing, HUnit/QuickCheck for testing,
process/unix/win32/filepath/directory for accessing OS facilities,
the list goes on.

Looking at
  http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/index.html
the Data.* hierarchy is a mere 2/11th of the modules listed (which
admittedly covers only a tiny selection of packages available, but these
are the ones distributed with ghc).

Regards,
    Malcolm