John Goerzen wrote:
There was a brief discussion on #haskell today about the Haskell
standard. I'd like to get opinions from more people, and ask if there
is any effort being done in this direction presently.
I think an updated standard is overdue. I find it difficult anymore to
write any but the most trivial of programs using pure Haskell 98.
[snip]
This is perhaps a minor point, but if a serious new standardization
effort were to emerge, I would like to see the formal semantics of
Haskell firmed up a little. The Haskell 98 report does a pretty good
job, but it fails to specify an explicit abstract term language for the
Haskell kernel, and doesn't (in my opinion) do a satisfactory job of
supplying formal semantics for the IO monad (this one's tough; perhaps
via a transform to the pi-calculus?). It obviously doesn't even touch
the semantics of extensions like implicit parameters, multi-parameter
typeclasses (straightforward, but...), existential types or the STM monad.
A serious effort in this area might allow practical interoperability
between pluggable Haskell frontends (parsing, typechecking, desugaring,
template expansion) and backends (optimization, code gen, linking) which
interface via something that looks a lot like external core, as well as
making Haskell more amenable to formal verification.
Robert Dockins
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