The Preface of the Haskell Report says:
The comittee hopes that Haskell can serve as a basis for future research
in language design. We hope that extensions or variants of the language
may appear, incorporating experimental features.
Various extensions have been proposed or even implemented. It would be nice
to have a second companion document to the Haskell Report, dedicated to
extensions.
Placed at the official WWW-sites of the Report, but updated more frequently,
it would provide a central registry for extension proposals and a central
source of information for both the comittee and 'ordinary' Haskell users.
The extension register should be divided into categories roughly describing
the status of each proposal and could even include comments from the comittee,
like: 'We rejected this proposal for the following reasons' or 'We judge this
to be a very interesting extension, but haven't decided yet about the best
way to include it in the standard'. There should be a list of open problems
(e.g. conflicts with other language elements), expected advantages and known
disadvantages for each proposal.
Categories could be:
PROPOSED description available (formal or informal)
REJECTED rejected by the comittee or given up by the author
PROTOTYPE implemented in at least one of the available systems
SCHEDULED accepted (will be included in one of the next versions)
What do You think about it?
cr
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Some examples:
(the list is far from complete and only intended to show the need for a
register, so please, don't flame me for mistakes and omissions ;-)
STATE: Haskell 1.2
PROPOSED
?
REJECTED
views
PROTOTYPE
existential types (chalmers)
fudgets (chalmers)
mutable arrays (glasgow)
ST monad (glasgow)
ccall (glasgow)
unboxed datatypes (glasgow)
constructor classes (nottingham)
monad comprehensions (nottingham)
records (yale)
foreign function interface (yale)
X window interface (yale)
concurrent execution, ...
SCHEDULED
monadic I/O (1.3)
...
-------------
Hmm.., there should be a section on proposals concerning the
language environment as well:
PROPOSED
debugger (??)
REJECTED
PROTOTYPE
interactive environment (chalmers,nottingham,yale)
parser generator (glasgow)
profiling, ...
SCHEDULED
--
Claus Reinke University of Kiel
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Department of Computer Science
http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~cr/ Preusserstr. 1-9, 24105 Kiel
