* Isaac Jones: > I'd like to ask the Debian community to look at Haskell98 and some of > the "research" extensions[2] and give us some input as to what would > make Haskell more attractive to you.
Uhm, most of the things on Debian's (as opposed to individual developer's) whishlist are quality-of-implementation issues, not really language issues. A sensible approach to separate compiliation, so that it's possible to change the implementation of a module without having to recompile all of its clients. This helps to avoid that packages in our distributions are too closely coupled, which makes updating individual components manageable (for example, to patch a security vulnerability). Dynamic shared objects with stable ABIs across compiler versions would be a nice benefit, but I understand that implementing this is hard. There should be compilers which are portable to Debian's release architectures, which consume moderate amounts of memory (just a few dozen megabytes, but pretty please not a few hundred) and are reasonably fast. This means that Haskell programs won't bog down our build daemons, so we can afford as many of them as we like. We can cope with C++, so we shouldn't demand too much from other languages. 8-) Apart from that, I find your question a bit strange. Maybe that's because Debian ships implementations for so many programming languages that yet another one (or even a new revision of an existing one) doesn't make a real difference. The separate compilation aspect is important, but it currently does not matter much because Haskell packages generally have very short dependency chains as far as other Haskell packages are concerned. On a more personal note, I found the non-predictable space behavior very hard to deal with. I'd also like to see something like unsafePerformIO in the language standard: a trapdoor into the IO monad which may lead to the side effect happening multiple times, but which is type-safe. (The rationale is that unsafePerformIO does occur in real-world programs, so there seems to be a real-world demand for it, but its horribly un-soundness makes it look really bad.) But I can understand that tackling unsafePerformIO might take Haskell into a direction the greater community has little interest in. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]