On Fri, 18 Sep 1998, Jan Skibinski wrote:
>
>
> On 18 Sep 1998, Will Partain wrote:
>
> [cut]
>
> > We (Glaswegians) tried to do a "Haskell library" in the
> > early days, but not much came of it except for Stephen
> > Bevan's numerical code. But that's no reason not to swing
> > 'round and try again; after all, there should be *much* more
> > Haskell code in existence than in 1991.
> >
> > Will
>
> Please do! But I beg you to revise some of the library
> from time to time, perhaps by contacting the original
> authors? Surely they would happily make some improvements
> -- granted some interest in their work. It is not enough
> to say "we have it", it will be nice to assure that
> it works and is well documented. Otherwise we have an illusion
> of the library only.
Be aware that such a standard cuts both ways: what you get is good but you
probably get a substantially lower amount of stuff. Case in point: I've
got a collection of Haskell scripts (not libraries but useful as scripts
and perhaps some small bits might be suitable for going into libraries)
which I mean to make publicly available, BUT the oldest ones have been
waiting ONE AND A HALF YEARS for me to find the time to write reasonable
documentation and check them carefully for any site & interpreter specific
dependencies.
My suggest is to perhaps have a two tier system: one where rough-and-ready
stuff can be put on the understanding that (a) there's no guarantees of
quality & (b) anyone is free to improve it and submit the improved
version without requiring author-consent, and another with stuff verified
to have a much higher quality documentation, portability and correctness.
___cheers,_dave__________________________________________________________
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] "I This is not a game.
www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~tweed/pi.htm II Here and now, you are alive."
work tel: (0117) 954-5253 -- Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
