what's the goal of haskell-prime?

[jur]

On Jan 25, 2006, at 9:37 AM, Johannes Waldmann wrote:

> Dear all, in the "mission statement" I read
>
>>   We will strive to only include tried-and-true language features,
>
> but the current discussion seems to have a wider focus,
> i. e. it is more of a wish list. Indeed I think that this is a good
> idea (ask (future) Haskell users what they want)
> but it might not be the original goal of the Haskell-Prime effort.

Hello,

I have been on this mailing list since yesterday, so maybe this
has been addressed before.

My first question is: who are the future users of Haskell?

For instance: is this group homogenuous enough to define a single  
standard,
or would it  be advisable to define various layers in the language.
A compiler may then choose to support up to and including a number of  
layers.
I can imagine a compiler for students to learn functional programming  
with
to have seriously different demands from the compiler used by  
researchers
to do programming language research. I am usually not happy with the  
fact that
novice programmers pay in clarity (of type error messages and  
diagnostics
in general) for features they won't be using for a number of years.  
This choice
can be left up the compiler builder, but I think it might have a  
place here too.


Jurriaan Hage