Question

When I first learned Haskell, Haskell ’98 was the official published language specification. Today, that specification is Haskell 2010. (I have to admit, I have a really hard time remembering what the heck the differences actually are.)

Now Haskell has been around for a long time. (Well, in computing terms it’s a long time.) So what I’m wondering is… Have there been any major design changes to the language over Haskell’s history? Or have all the changes been relatively minor? Is there somewhere I can find a list of these, without sitting down and reading through every version of the Haskell Report trying to spot the differences?

Answer 1

The history of the language, including major milestones and design decisions, is described in

• A History of Haskell: being lazy with class.

@INPROCEEDINGS{Hudak07ahistory,
    author = {Paul Hudak and John Hughes and Simon Peyton Jones and Philip Wadler},
    title = {A history of Haskell: Being lazy with class},
    booktitle = {In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on History of Programming Languages (HOPL-III},
    year = {2007},
    pages = {1--55},
    publisher = {ACM Press}
}