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Roman Garcia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> asks:
> I would like to know whicht is Haskell 1.3's Libraries status.
> [...] When will be available the final version?
Yale's passed control over to the new Library Czar (Kevin Hammond at
St Andrews Uni - [EMAIL PROTECTED]) who is hacking the library
report into final form at this very moment.
The version we passed over to Kevin is available in html form:
http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/haskell-report/newlib/library.html
I'd guess that the final version won't be too different.
Roman also asks:
> Is it possible to introduce new changes to the libraries?
Minor changes should be sent to Kevin as soon as possible. For major
changes it's probably too late so you need to know how (we think)
library development is going to work in the future:
o Somewhere (Glasgow?) will act as a central repository for both draft and
complete libraries (documentation, implementation (or different
implementations optimised for different Haskell compilers), design docs,
test suites, comments on the current design, ...). All kept under version
control and available to anyone via anonymous ftp and the WWW.
o Anyone, anywhere in the world can be assigned control of a library
with the right to update the contents of the repository. (In fact,
there's no reason why several people shouldn't work on independent
versions of the same library if they can't agree to work together.)
o Anyone, anywhere in the world will be free to inspect the repository
and mail comments to the person responsible for a given library.
o The Library Czar will act as coordinator and will make final decisions
about what is ready for standardisation, publication, etc. and will
produce and enforce documentation standards.
Some consequences of this approach:
o Draft libraries should be available earlier than in the past - so
feedback, draft implementations, etc should be available earlier.
o Design stability becomes more of an issue.
Actually, stability has always been an issue - having a central
repository which keeps old versions on hand simply makes changes
more visible and gives us some chance of dealing with them.
I expect we'll see greater use of Change Logs and maybe even Motif-style
stability guarantees: "the interface/behaviour of this function is
stable for the next 3 months/6 months/1 year/2 years/...".
o The whole notion of "standard" libraries becomes much fuzzier.
If you can download the source code for a well documented, thoroughly
tested library from somewhere, does it really matter whether it is
part of the language standard? Receiving the blessing of the Library
Czar just indicates that He believes the library is well designed,
well documented, well implemented, etc.
(Exception: some libraries such as Array, System, IO, etc require compiler
support. Such libraries need to be standardised to ensure that all
compilers provide implementations.)
--
Alastair Reid Yale Haskell Project Hacker
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://WWW.CS.Yale.EDU/homes/reid-alastair.html
