Sittampalam, Ganesh:
Aaron Denney wrote:
On 2008-04-23, Sittampalam, Ganesh
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
There's plenty of code out there that doesn't have the benefit of a
vigilant user community ready to spring into action. For example,
Credit Suisse has several tens of thousands of lines of code written
by internal users who are not Haskell experts, and it would be
rather
hard to explain to them that they needed to go through it all and
fix
it.
What makes them need to update to Haskell' instead of sticking with
Haskell '98?
(a) the fact that the code already uses several GHC extensions that
will
be in Haskell' and we would like to be closer to standard code
(b) the expectation that at some point implementations will stop
supporting
H98
Care for legacy code is important, but H' will have to break backwards
compatibility in some places. And especially where you already rely
on GHC extensions, you can't really expect that H' will adopt features
that have been available as GHC extensions in exactly the form that
they were implemented in GHC.
We should be careful about where we break existing code, and we should
try to support automatic translation of H98 to H' code, but any
changes that we do not make now will become even more difficult in the
future when there is even more Haskell code. Look at what is
happening now already, industrial users applying pressure on the
committee to not change the language too much for the sake of legacy
code. A clear indication that anything we don't change now, we will
have to live with forever.
Hence, anything that is *important* to change, we should change now.
We should mitigate the pain by having a H98 to H' translator and
Haskell compilers will surely support a Haskell98 compatibility mode
as long as there are enough users interested in such a feature. (This
is not unlike the transition from K&R C to ANSI C.)
Manuel
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