[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANNOUNCE: Utrecht Haskell Compiler (UHC) --first release

[Sittampalam, Ganesh]

Miguel Mitrofanov wrote:
> Jon Fairbairn wrote on 20.04.2009 13:59:
>> Achim Schneider <barsoap at web.de> writes:
>> 
>>> Jon Fairbairn <jon.fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> atze at cs.uu.nl writes:
>>>> 
>>>>> 	    Utrecht Haskell Compiler -- first release, version 1.0.0
>>>>> 	    ========================================================
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> The UHC team is happy to announce the first public release of the
>>>>> Utrecht Haskell Compiler (UHC). UHC supports almost all Haskell98
>>>>> features
>>>> Why? Is there something about Haskell 98 that's hard to implement?
>>>> 
>>> Insanity. I doubt anyone is going to miss n+k patterns:
>> 
>> That (taken with the followup from Richard O'Keefe saying he does use
>> them) underlines my point, really. What follows is specific to
>> Haskell, but the general point applies to most languages I've
>> encountered. 
>> 
>> I have no love for n+k patterns, but they are part of
>> Haskell98 -- and were the subject of protracted arguments for and
>> against them before the Report was finished (I was against them, if I
>> remember correctly). Any implementation claiming to be of Haskell98
>> should have them, whether or not the implementor likes them, because
>> otherwise someone will come along with a valid Haskell98 programme
>> and it won't compile, so they'll have to hack it around. This sort of
>> thing (and resulting #ifdef all over the place) wastes far more
>> programmer time in the end (assuming the compiler becomes popular)
>> than it would take to implement the feature.
>> 
>> It's not an implementor's place to make such decisions -- they can
>> legitimately say "this feature sucks" and tell the next Haskell
>> committee so. If they care enough about it, they can lobby or get on
>> that next committee, but the arguments for n+k patterns /in
>> Haskell98/ were done long ago. 
>> 
>> 
> I disagree. First of all, UHC states explicitly that some features
> are not supported (and probably never would be). Secondly, it seems
> like almost nobody uses (n+k)-patterns, and when they are used, they
> make the code less readable; so it's good NOT to support them, in
> order to make programmers avoid them as much as possible. I don't
> think #ifdef's would be really "all over the place"; it's more likely
> that a minor refactoring would take place so that (n+k)-patterns
> would disappear.       

In addition, (n+k) patterns will be removed from the standard as soon as
the Haskell prime process produces a new one, so people who want to make
their code support that new standard should be removing them right now.

Ganesh

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