I disagree that we should be standardizing language features that have not been implemented.
I think having an implementation is important because: 1. the act of implementing a feature forces you to work out details that you may not have thought of ahead of time. For example, for a small syntactic extension, the implementation would have to work out how to fit it in the grammar, and how to present the new feature in, say, error messages. 2. having an implementation allows users to try out the extension and gain some empirical evidence that the extension is actually useful in practice (this is hard to quantify, I know, but it is even harder if you can't even use the extension at all). If some feature ends up being particularly useful, it could always be standardized in the next iteration of the language, when we've gained some experience using it in practice. -Iavor On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 11:17 AM, John Wiegley <jo...@newartisans.com> wrote: > >>>>> Gershom B <gersh...@gmail.com> writes: > > > While such changes should definitely be in scope, I do think that the > proper > > mechanism would be to garner enough interest to get a patch into GHC > > (whether through discussion on the -prime list or elsewhere) and have an > > experimental implementation, even for syntax changes, before such > proposals > > are considered ready for acceptance into a standard as such. > > Just a side note: This is often how the C++ committee proceeds as well: a > language proposal with an experimental implementation is given much higher > credence than paperware. However, they don't exclude paperware either. > > So I don't think we need to rely on implementation before considering a > feature we all want, but I do agree that seeing a patch in GHC first allows > for much testing and experimentation. > > -- > John Wiegley GPG fingerprint = 4710 CF98 AF9B 327B B80F > http://newartisans.com 60E1 46C4 BD1A 7AC1 4BA2 > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-prime mailing list > Haskell-prime@haskell.org > http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime >
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