Isaac Jones wrote:
My intuition (and a proposal) is that our job will be to:
1. conservatively standardize some of the most robust extensions,
2. clean up the class hierarchies and some libraries,
3. solve the MPTC dilemma (see above), and
4. pick one other "big idea" such as records or bang patterns.
Thoughts?
Given the amount of excitement and interest in new extensions (and in
doing more than a conservative standard), I see a fifth goal: come up
with some way of helping users and implementers cope with the complexity
of lots of different (and sometimes conflicting) extensions.
Some possibilities I see here are:
(a) some standard, documented way for groups to come together to "bless"
a widely-used extension (and, consequently, a way for people to find out
what the blessed extensions are)
(b) a way for programs to test what extensions are provided by their
implementation (so users know what specific things a program depends on
- rather than just saying you need some specific implementation)
(c) a way for programs to conditionally configure themselves based on
what extensions are available - so it is easier to write portable
programs and libraries that use extensions beyond Haskell'
The long-run hope I would have is that this sort of infrastructure might
make the next standardization round easier - it will be more
immediately obvious which extensions exist and where they belong in the
process.
- Ravi
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