Proposal: Applicative => Monad: Is there any consensus?

[Stephen Tetley]

On 3 February 2011 14:24, John Smith <voldermort at hotmail.com> wrote:
> On 03/02/2011 15:54, Stephen Tetley wrote:
>>
>> I'd contend the proposal is too disruptive to be independent of a
>> language revision, so I'd vote no on the proposal as it stands.
>
> What do you mean by "independent of a language revision"? The idea is that,
> if accepted, this will be proposed for Haskell'.

The current proposal is a libraries change against "Base" which is
roughly speaking means it is a proposal to change GHC 7.0.2.

If the change were made for GHC 7.0.2, code and equally importantly
books would be out-of-date. My feeling is that a change of this
magnitude should be a change to the language standard i.e. Haskell
2012 (Prelude is covered by the standard).

Currently Haskell' asks for changes to be implemented in a compiler
before they are considered, I'd argue that whilst this is correct for
language extensions it is not necessarily the best situation for
library changes where the balance is different:

Language extension - the weight of effort borne by the developers of
the first implementation to prove the concept.

Library change - the weight of effort is borne by the whole community
(revising code, new editions of books, etc.)