Drastic Prelude changes imminent

[Mark Lentczner]

On Sun, Feb 1, 2015 at 4:09 AM, Herbert Valerio Riedel <hvr at gnu.org> wrote:

> Fwiw, the 3+ year argument applies to almost any `base`-augmentation if
> you need such backward-compatibility. By that argument there's little
> incentive to add anything to `base` at all.
>

That isn't true. Careful additions of things to existing modules that are
generally imported qualified are fine.
Additions of new modules are fine. Yes, a side effect of being 'base' is
that it is harder to change and must consider backward and forward
compatibility over a longer time span.

So pre-FTP (in GHC 7.8), the following is needed to more or less emulate
> the post-FTP state:



*[many line of ugly imports]*


That isn't the right tradeoff. Without FTP, one imports qualified:

   import qualified Data.Foldable as F
   import qualified Data.Traversable as T

If importing qualified is too much a barrier to use of Foldable and
Traversable - then I think we should re-consider how useful they are.

If we
> don't intend to make Foldable/Traversable a first-class citizen of
> Haskell to help increase its adoption, why have it in `base` in the
> first place?
>

"first-class citizen" better not equate to "you get it with the Prelude"
nor "you can always import it unqualified". If we use either of those as
the bar, then we will end up with huge number of things in default scope,
and we'll namespace it by prefix strings *alá PHP.*


> Moreover, how do we justify (other than by historic accident) that the
> more generalised synonyms are stored away in modules … Do lists really
> require such a special
> privilege?
>

Yup, historic accident *and* lists do get special privilege. We could
easily turn your question around: Why do Foldable and Traversable deserve
to be not only importable unqualified, but by all programs as part of the
Prelude?

Why not rather place the more general versions into the default scope
> … This results in a more symmetric
> situation.
>

It might be more symmetric. But I don't see universal acclaim that Foldable
and Traversable are a generalization to be preferred over lists in the
majority of code. And the "why not" is because it is a big change to the
Prelude with negative consequences judged significant by many of us.

The design-choices of the FTP implementation were motivated to achieve
> its goal while breaking as little existing code as possible. We assumed
> this to be the better compromise rather than introducing a severe
> breakage of the majority existing Haskell code which don't
> qualify-import `Data.List`.


In the evaluation, we need to consider at least a third choice: Not to do
FTP at all.

- Mark
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