Hi I think Henrik's criteria are pretty close to perfect.
> As I have argued before on the committee list, I also think we should *not* > worry about backwards incompatible changes too much in cases where a simple > automatic translation from H98 to H' code is possible. Even for a large > project, it is IMHO no big hardship to run a H98->H' translator over all > Haskell sources. Some questions: 1) Will I (the programmer) have to mode switch in painful ways between H98 and H'? Do I have to learn a pile of exceptions, or is there some common rule that works? (i.e. removing n+k is fine since I just don't learn it, changing the fixity of $ is not since I need to know both) 2) Will tool T (the translator) work on academic papers that have previously been published. 3) Will tool T handle all of GHC's extensions. 4) Will tool T deal with things like CPP, hsc, trhsx, happy, alex etc... - all these file formats which include embedded Haskell. 5) Will tool T ever exist. I think the answer to 2-5 is nearly certainly going to be "No". I don't think the relevance of a conversion tool should even be considered until some person steps forward and says without doubt that _they_ will write the converter. Even if they did there very best, it still won't be trivial to use in all cases. > As John Launchbury has said, given Haskell's current rise in popularity, > anything that > we do not fix with H' will be much harder, if not impossible, to fix in the > future. That is a very good point. Perhaps we're already a little too late. Thanks Neil _______________________________________________ Haskell-prime mailing list Haskell-prime@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime
