PROPOSAL: Remove Control.OldException

[Simon Marlow]

On 22/07/2009 08:19, Iavor Diatchki wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 10:11 PM, Duncan
> Coutts<duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk>  wrote:
>> On Mon, 2009-07-20 at 09:27 +0300, Iavor Diatchki wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>> Please do not remove OldException.
>>> -Iavor
>>
>> Can you give any rationale? Are you trying to maintain compatibility
>> with base-3 by using CPP + OldException? Is that significantly easier
>> than using the extensible-exceptions package?
>
> 1. I would have to go and change all code that uses exceptions, again.
> 2. I am not sure how to write backwards compatible code.  CPP +
> OldException is not pretty but it works.
> 3. The extensible exception package is not Haskell 98 (it uses
> existentials), so it really would be nice if _it_ was placed in a
> separate package.

Not practical, unfortunately.  Exceptions are very deeply wired in: they 
are even dependended on by the Monad IO instance, for example (for 
"fail", which is well-named), and the Prelude exports catch.  Not the 
extensible version of course, but the Prelude's catch is defined in 
terms of the extensible catch.

> On that topic, it would be great if we had a way to
> see what are all the extensions used by a program (including those
> used by dependent packages).

A prerequisite is to make it an error to use any extensions not declared 
in the .cabal file.  We talked about this a long time ago, but never got 
around to doing anything about it.

Having done that, you can easily see what extensions are being used by a 
package: look in the .cabal file.  Cabal-install could figure out the 
extensions used by dependencies, although it would always include base 
which uses a raft of extensions, so I'm not sure how useful that would be.

> 4.  Ian's proposal did not provide any motivation for this change.  Is
> the benefit the we clean things up a bit?  If so, I think that it is a
> bit soon to do it.

Ok.  We should at least deprecate Control.OldException, so we can remove 
it in 6.14?

Cheers,
	Simon