On Wed, 8 Sep 1999, S. Alexander Jacobson wrote:
> Are we talking about documentation for the H98 libraries?
> Are these libraries relevant? Don't MPTC, Existential Types, Restricted
> Type Synonyms, Arrows, and an FFI substantial change the architecture,
> interface, and implementation of the libraries? As these language
> features are becoming more accepted (implemented in GHC & Hugs), is it
> worth investing time in supporting what are in fact really strange library
> APIs.
For me at least there's an 95% of the scripts that I use Haskell for (data
analysis, testing toy models, general prototyping of algorithms) don't
involve any of the above, and unless I'm missing things there's no way
that using them would improve matters. So I'd add my support (though not
at the moment my time unfortunately) to documenting all the haskell
libraries that contain non-controversial classic functional programming
stuff, eg, List, Monad, etc. I'm reasonably frequently in the situation
where I think `There's probably a standard function that I can use to do
this, but it'll probably be marginally quicker to write my own than hunt
it down'.
Of course I'm aware that I use Haskell for completely different purposes
to people like Alex, and see his point that some of the `interacting with
the outside world' libraries may be superseded (in a de facto sense)
soon.
___cheers,_dave______________________________________________________
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] "He'd stay up all night inventing an
www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~tweed/pi.htm alarm clock to ensure he woke early
work tel: (0117) 954-5253 the next morning"-- Terry Pratchett
