Wolfgang Jeltsch:
Am Donnerstag, 24. April 2008 05:13 schrieb Manuel M T Chakravarty:
[…]
Hence, anything that is *important* to change, we should change now.
Although I can follow your arguments, I thought that the large and
disruptive
changes should be done for Haskell 2.
Depends what you mean by Haskell 2. If it is an experimental language
that shares some superficial similarities with Haskell, sure we may
have Haskell 2. If you mean a serious successor of Haskell with the
expectation that many/most Haskell users will eventually move to
Haskell 2, then no. Haskell has been gaining a lot of momentum
recently. That's good and bad, but surely makes it hard to change the
trajectory. (This is, of course, just my personal opinion.)
If they should really be done now, we
should also fix a lot of other things. For example, the Num
hierarchy, the
Functor/Applicative/Monad hierarchy, the fact that there exist
Alternative
and MonadPlus although we have Monoid, the fact that we cannot have
contexts
like (forall a. Monoid (m a)) which is the source for the last
problem, the
fact that we don’t have class aliases, ugly names like fmap and
mappend, etc.
As Lennart and Ganesh have argued, the amount of breaking changes that
we we will be able to fit in without causing serious problems is
limited.
Manuel
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