H98 Text IO

[Johan Tibell]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 6:51 PM, Bulat Ziganshin
<bulat.ziganshin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Simon,
>
>
>  Tuesday, February 26, 2008, 7:34:50 PM, you wrote:
>
>  > Use openBinaryFile (or hSetBinaryMode) and your program will work with all
>  > compilers, both before and after this change.
>
>  it is what i mean - we just have found one more way to break
>  compatibility with existing haskell code. it is important part of our
>  efforts to keep haskell community as small as possible, ideally it
>  should include just authors of haskell tools itself

Python 3000 is backwards incompatible with many current Python
programs. I don't expect lots of Pythonistas to jump ship because of
it. In the process of thinking about what should go into Python 3000
they recognized that breaking backwards compatibility was necessary to
fix some problems (e.g. the same Unicode problems as we have in the
Haskell community.) Agreed, you don't want to continuously break
people's programs but I think it's OK to sometimes do it if it's
really needed for the long-term usefulness of the language. We should
look at the Python community and try to provide an as smooth upgrade
path as possible. One possibility is to keep old compilers around for
a time.

-- Johan