On 02-May-2000, Jerzy Karczmarczuk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> For me it is obvious that Simon PJ, the Oregon Strong Team,
> Lennart, and others who actively work/ed *on the language
> itself* have different priorities! Changing a mature
> programming language is dangerous, everybody knows that
> (in particular if one teaches it...).
>
> ==
>
> I believe that the situation will get unblocked with the
> birth of the *successor* to Haskell.
Well, Mercury is not really intended as a successor to Haskell --
more like a competitor ;-). But if people work on the design
of math class hierarchy for Haskell, this work might eventually
find its way into Mercury, even if it doesn't make it into Haskell.
Mercury has a Haskell-like type class system, but its current standard
library, which predates the adoption of type classes in Mercury, does
not use type classes at all. So in the medium to long term, we are
planning on developing a new standard library for Mercury, one which
does make appropriate use of type classes. The design of this new
library is completely up for grabs at this point. We'd like to smooth
the transition as much as possible, so probably the names in the new
library will match those in our existing library, but as far as the
class hierarchy is concerned, there are no backwards compatibility
constraints at all.
--
Fergus Henderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh> | of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] | -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
