At 17:24 97/08/21, Wolfgang Beck wrote:
>Does Haskell really need the features that will be part of
>a Research Haskell? Or is it better to freeze Haskell development
>now and start developing systems u s i n g Haskell? Languages look
>very ugly if too overloaded with new concepts (look at C++).
>
>If Haskell still lacks important features it is no use to
>make a Standard Haskell now.
It certainly so that Standard Haskell is going to need the features being
developed in Research Haskell, as I see it, and some of those features have
been mentioned here: Better (more general) typing system, a more secure
foundation for monads, parallel threads, standards for GUI and perhaps
multimedia, perhaps support for distributed programming, ability to combine
Haskell code with that of other languages.
On the other hand, there seems to be no reason to require Standard
Haskell to have all that from the outset; it seems best to put that in
Standard Haskell when successful solutions have been made in Research
Haskell.
At 01:16 97/08/22, Fergus Henderson wrote:
>I think you really have to stop and think very carefully about
>what you would gain from an ISO/ANSI standard for Haskell,
>and about what you would lose. I can see only two benefits:
>prestige, and ability to use Haskell on certain rare government contracts.
>But the latter is not an significant issue, since I don't think anyone
>is considering using Haskell for those sort of government contracts
>anyway. There are certainly some potentially significant drawbacks.
I saw an industrial problem that I think a language like Haskell would do
very well _if_combined_with_an_imperative_language, like C++ perhaps,
namely a complicated spec for a program simulating a RISC CPU. Such a spec
could easily be handled by Haskell, reading it from a file; then the
circuit components of the simulator might be implemented using C++. Wadler
mentioned telecom applications of Haskell combined with Erlang.
So I think that there are several very exiting industrial uses of
Haskell. The point with an ISO/ANSI standard would be that people would
find it secure to invest time and money in writing such Haskell code. With
a language like C++, the emergence of an ISO/ANSI draft standard helped to
get improved compilers, too (most C++ compilers are buggy and incomplete).
Hans Aberg
* AMS member: Listing <http://www.ams.org/cml/>
* Email: Hans Aberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
