As long as we're on the subject...
My biggest wishes for Haskell-2 are existential types
and the TREX extensible record system from Hugs 1.3.
I've found these two extensions *extremely* handy.
It would also be nice if field labels were lexically
distinct from ordinary functions, so they could live
in their own namespace (a la Standard ML).
I'd like to see the numeric class hierarchy re-organized
along lines suggested by modern algebra. That is,
it should be organized in terms of Groups, Rings,
Fields, etc., instead of Integral, Fractional, Real,
etc. I have no idea how this should look exactly,
so I'll just request it and leave it to people smarter
than me to hammer out the details :-)
Along the same lines, we need type classes for preorders
and partial orders in addition to 'Ord', which only
works for (weak) total orders.
'default' should be generalized to work with arbitrary
type classes, not just Num. 'default' has always seemed
rather ad-hoc to me...
Lastly (in the unlikely event that this issue comes
up again), I'd also like to see list comprehensions,
map, etc., be re-overloaded to arbitrary Monads. IIRC,
the main reason comprehensions et al. were de-overloaded
is because ambiguities led to error messages that
bewildered novices. If it were possible to declare
default Monad ([])
this problem could be alleviated.
That's my $.02...
--Joe English
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
P.S., thanks to all the people who've worked on Haskell
over the years. I've learned more and had more fun with
this language than any other.
