Please don't deprecate Haskell 98 modules.

[Yitzchak Gale]

John Meacham wrote:
> Please don't deprecate these modules.
> It is actively contributing to bitrot to deprecate a perfectly useful
> and well defined API.

I think "deprecate" is just the wrong word. Gwern is not
saying that we should remove haskell98 from Hackage,
nor remove the -98 flag from Hugs, nor build a special
case into compilers that make modules not compile if
they use Haskell 98 syntax.

As I understand it, the problem he is trying to solve is the
following:

Haskell code today uses hierarchical module names almost
universally. This has been the case for years. Yet a huge number
of packages on Hackage directly or indirectly depend on the
the haskell98 module, whose sole purpose is to allow the old
non-hierarchical module names from pre-addendum Haskell 98.

Gwern is just trying to think of a way to remove all of those
spurious dependencies. I agree that this cleanup would be
a good idea. The only question is, how do we best go about it?

Or have I misunderstood?

Thanks,
Yitz