On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 5:24 PM, Ian Lynagh <ig...@earth.li> wrote: > On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 08:21:00AM +0200, Johan Tibell wrote: > > On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 3:34 AM, Ian Lynagh <ig...@earth.li> wrote: > > > > > > http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/StricterLabelledFieldSyntax > > > > > > > In general, I think it would be a good idea to provide some statistics of > > how many packages would break as the result of a backwards incompatible > > change. Without that data I find it hard to do a cost-benefit analysis. > > To some extent you are right, and if we had an easy to to get those > stats when I would be in favour of doing so. > > But it is important to remember that a count of packages that break > won't tell you how hard it would be to fix them. For example, the > complete diff needed to fix old-time for StricterLabelledFieldSyntax > was: > > - toClockTime cal{ctMonth=month', ctYear=year'} > + toClockTime $ cal{ctMonth=month', ctYear=year'}
Right. So once you know what breaks you can investigate why and, as a part of the language change proposal, show how easy/hard it would be to fix breakages. I'm not arguing against breaking changes but for using the available data to make decisions. For example, when a redesign of haskell.org was brought up a while back the discussion could have greatly benefited from looking at web server logs to give valuable insight into user behavior on the site. -- Johan
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