At 10:37 97/08/22, John Hughes wrote:
> What
>we're proposing is simple to make one more revision --- call it Haskell 1.5 if
>you like --- and then not to make any more.
...
>The point has also been made that Haskell 1.4 lacks some features that are
>already quite well understood and will be sorely missed for serious
>applications --- multi-parameter classes, state threads, existential and
>universal types. If this is the last revision then the most important
>extensions must be considered now; they can't be deferred until the next
>version.
I think the subtleties of the computer lingo got me confused: We are
speaking about the last _revision_ here, like going Haskell 1.4->1.5, and
not about the last _version_, like going Haskell 1.x->2.0.
>I'm well aware of that, and I think the rest of the committee is
>too. Extensions are not ruled out: nevertheless I think it's right that we
>should approach such matters in a restrictive spirit. The last thing we want
>to do is add experimental features to `Standard Haskell', only to find out in
>a year's time that we got the design wrong. It seems to me that the three
>points above probably are sufficiently well understood for us to get the
>design right now; other ideas like interaction with other programming
>languages probably are not. However, I don't want to pre-empt the committee's
>work here by saying in advance what will go in and what will not.
But perhaps one should still make a distinction between "Standard
Haskell" and "Research Haskell", so that people know what to expect, and
still giving room for the experimentation needed in the research
developments.
Hans Aberg
* AMS member: Listing <http://www.ams.org/cml/>
* Email: Hans Aberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
