Adding System.FilePath

[David House]

On 27/03/07, Simon Marlow <simonmarhaskell at gmail.com> wrote:
> The main thing that Haskell' should do, IMO, is to get rid of everything IOish
> from the Prelude and drop the IO module.  Then it becomes possible to
> disentangle the IO library from the base package (well, more possible at least),
> and we can think about experimenting with alternative IO APIs.

Personally, my hope for solving the libraries problem (libraries need
to be updated more often than a compiler release rolls around), is
cabal-install. IMO GHC should ship with a _very_ minimal set of
libraries, perhaps none at all, then cabal-install should be used to
install, and keep up-to-date, the associated libraries. Then changes
like adding System.FilePath will take place within a week or two, not
within a year or two. As I see it, this approach still has two major
disadvantages:

1) It makes it impractical to code Haskell without a network
connection, although this is become less of a problem all the time
(who currently does code without one?)
2) Breaking backward-compatibility would have to be treated _very_
seriously, as otherwise we'd end up with literally hundreds of
different versions of the libraries, none of which compatible with one
another, and with applications written with only specific versions in
mind.

Still, food for though. Don't let's detract from the System.FilePath
discussion, though.

-- 
-David House, dmhouse at gmail.com