RE: Summary of current change suggestions

[Simon Marlow]

I've kept pretty quiet on this issue before, because I didn't have a
strong view.  Now I'm concerned that some of the suggestions people are
making would take the design in the wrong direction.  

   * specifying libraries in the source isn't the right way to
     go.  Library names change independently of APIs, and can be
     platform-specific.  

     This should be a compiler-specific feature: eg. GHC uses package
     specifications to identify libraries.  Addtionally allowing
     libraries to be specified in the source would just be a pain for
     us.

   * specifying include files in the source is fine; but I'm actually
     quite happy to leave this to an external tool like hsc2hs
     to sort out rather than adding extra syntax to the language,
     but that's just me.  If we really must add new syntax, let's
     make it as general as possible to accomodate future design
     enhancements.  I'd go with

          foreign decl cinclude "<foo/bar.h>"

     in other words,
        
            foreign decl VARID [ STRING ]

Cheers,
        Simon

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