Drastic Prelude changes imminent

[Richard Eisenberg]

If memory serves, what became the BBP was initially introduced at the Haskell Implementors' Workshop in Boston in 2013. (Or, at least, that's when I became aware of it.) I know I'm a special case of a Haskell user, but I've seen mention of the BBP aplenty. However, I do think we should learn from this experience and perhaps establish a very-low-traffic list where we announce breaking language changes.

As for the BBP itself, my 1¢ is that I've never liked it much, but I don't like the status quo either. (Too much `hiding` and `qualified`!) Having neither a good alternative nor time/energy to develop one has kept me relatively quiet in the discussion, and is why I'm offering only 1¢ right now instead of 2¢. (My chief concern is how it affects newcomers to Haskell, which is admittedly a different concern than others have expressed. It may be worth noting that my concern was addressed by suggesting newcomers use the `haskell2010` package... which is now defunct, due to fallout from the AMP.)

As a much more minor point, I believe
> {-# LANGUAGE NoImplicitPrelude #-}
and
> import Prelude ()
should have different behavior. Doesn't the latter import any Prelude instances? Might these be different (and conflicting with!) instances in an alternate prelude? So, I think we must mimic the pragma version as opposed to the empty import list.

Richard

On Jan 27, 2015, at 12:27 PM, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 12:25 PM, Gershom B <gershomb at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think that _if_ there had been a better organized, more clarifying discussion on the scope of BBP earlier (one was promised after Neil raised concerns, but I think it fell by the wayside), then we might not be in this boat.
> 
> Agreed. I knew this was coming from various mentions, but there was not a good overview of what was going on and what effects it would have until this thread. This makes me think that it might be wise to back off until 7.12.
> 
> -- 
> brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
> allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
> unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
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