The second draft of the Haskell 2010 report is now available in PDF and
HTML formats (the PDF looks a lot nicer):
http://www.haskell.org/~simonmar/haskell-2010-draft-report-2.pdf
http://www.haskell.org/~simonmar/haskell-2010-draft-report-2/haskell.html
relative to the first draft, which was only publicised on the
haskell-prime mailing list, I have now updated the libraries too.
Rather than update all the library documentation manually, I (perhaps
rashly) decided to make a LaTeX backend for Haddock instead, and
generate the report automatically from the library source code. Getting
this to work turned out to be a lot more effort than I anticipated, but
I think the results are quite attractive. Once the new Haddock backend
is incorporated upstream, we'll finally have the ability to generate
decent typeset API documentation. Furthermore, this should make it much
easier to incorporate more libraries in future versions of the Haskell
standard, should we decide to do so.
Right now, the HTML version of the report is generated from the LaTeX
sources, including the libraries. We could use the Haddock HTML output
instead, but that would entail some difficulties with cross-references
from the language part of the report to the libraries, which is why I've
left it this way for now. This is why the libraries part of the report
is bereft of hyperlinks in HTML; but at least it is well indexed in the
PDF version.
Summary of the library changes in Haskell 2010 relative to Haskell 98
and the FFI specification:
* All libraries have been updated to their hierarchical names
* The following library modules were dropped from the standard, due to
being obsolete or superseded. Replacements are not part of the
standard yet, but it is expected that they will be replaced in the
future:
Directory, System, Time, Locale, CPUTime, Random
In the case of System, some functions have moved to
the new modules System.Environment and System.Exit.
* Foreign.Marshal.Error: functions on IOError moved to System.Error
(this is where they've been in base for ever).
* Data.List: added intercalate, subsequences, permutations, foldl',
foldl1', stripPrefix (H2010 Data.List matches the current base
version).
* Data.Char: various additions of Unicode predicates (e.g. isLetter,
isMark, isNumber), the GeneralCategory type and generalCategory.
(matches the base version)
* Control.Monad: added forM, forM_, (>=>), (<=<), forever, foldM_,
replicateM, replicateM_ (matches the base version).
* System.IO: added fixIO, hSetFileSize, hTell, hIsTerminalDevice,
hSetEcho, hGetEcho, hShow. The base version has various additions:
hGetBuf/hPutBuf, binary Handles, encodings, and newline support,
but I erred on the side of being conservative here: these APIs
need discussion, and in some cases are probably not suitable
for the standard in their current state at all.
* System.IO.Error: new module, providing functionality that was
in Foreign.Marshal.Error in the FFI spec.
* System.IO.Exit: new module, functionality moved from H98 System
* System.Environment: new module, functionality moved from H98 System
We expect to provide exactly these libraries in GHC 6.14, although the
exact mechanism has yet to be decided; for discussion see
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2010-April/003158.html
Comments on the draft report are welcome, before I finalise this and
sign off on Haskell 2010.
Cheers,
Simon
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