Please don't deprecate Haskell 98 modules.

[Malcolm Wallace]

On 12 Mar 2010, at 02:11, John Meacham wrote:
> Except that writing a program that just uses Haskell 98 is a virtue,  
> not
> a vice. When you target a standard your program becomes much easier to
> maintain. As it is now, it is a major pain to write future compatible
> haskell.

+1 from me.  This is exactly the purpose of standards.

If you have multiple overlapping standards, then perhaps it would make  
sense to deprecate some of them.  But we are in the situation of  
having only two current standards ('98 and 2010), and they exactly  
agree on the contents of these libraries.

Furthermore, the H'98 standard itself states

     It is intended to be a "stable" language in sense the implementors
     are committed to supporting Haskell 98 exactly as specified, for
     the foreseeable future.

The base library package has no such guarantee - it is not supported  
in its entirety by all compilers, and it changes frequently.  (As one  
data point, base changes frequently enough and severely enough to  
break my nightly builds of nhc98 several times a year.)  In my view  
there is no way that base can be called stable yet.

Regards,
     Malcolm