proposal: standardize interface to Haskell' implementations

[John Meacham]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 03:21:27PM -0000, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> I, for one, would love it if you and others felt able to contribute to
> the Haskell-as-a-library interface (i.e. what it should look like to the
> client).  Whether we'd be anywhere near done for Haskell' I'm less
> certain.  

I personally wouldn't want to see such a thing in haskell'. It feels
like something that should be a portable library, not a part of the
language spec. There would be no reason to have multiple implementations
to standardize across, if someone wants to do something new and
interesting, those new and interesting things would be reflected in the
interface breaking the point of standardization anyway. We should be
thinking not what libraries we want to use, but rather what absolutely
needs to be in the language spec to allow the libraries we want to use
to be portable. I was always planning on spinning off the jhc front end
as a library, but it most likely would not be compatable with
ghc-as-a-library by design as it would have different goals and want to
explore different things. someone should be able to install both and use
them side by side. Artificial standardization would only hurt such a
project.

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈