Control.Category in base

[Bertram Felgenhauer]

Hi,

I played with ghc head today. I saw that its base library contains
Control.Category, and Control.Arrow uses that. (I also saw the
discussion about it on this mailing list. There weren't any serious
objections; the discussion was far from focused though [*], and I found
that the patch was applied rather abruptly. [1])

Anyway, here's what I found trying to compile HXT:

1) Control.Arrow doesn't export (>>>) and (<<<) anymore.
2) All user defined instances of Control.Arrow.Arrow break.

The first one is easily fixed in the base library.

The second one is more annoying. The required changes to HXT aren't
that big - my patch inserts 30 lines and deletes 10 - but it'll be
harder to make it compatible between several ghc versions.

So all in all I'm rather unhappy that this patch went in, because
it breaks existing code and personally I see little gain from it.

Personally I'd like to see that patch reverted. However I realize
that my complaint comes rather late, so if we decide to keep the
patch we have to fix the first issue above to minimize breakage of
other packages.

regards,

Bertram

[*] a lot of mails in the thread went off tangents, extending the
    proposal to refining the class hierarchy of arrows. For reference,
    the thread starts at
    http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2007-October/008291.html
[1] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2007-October/008496.html