Match packages based on gentoo package atoms about eix HOT 3 CLOSED

I would tend to agree with your approach that this is due to good technical distinctions, my complaint here is mainly that I always find myself reading the very long man page of eix every time I want to accomplish something like this - it's not very intuitive, and my first instinct is always to try portage's syntax.

But I suppose I can concede that argument as an unfortunate side effect of them simply not being the same tool. It's just unfortunate.

from eix.

The first test should perhaps be eix -I --in-overlay haskell
However, searching for version numbers makes no sense. Indeed, you are actually not looking for version numbers but for the "live" property; for instance also 9999999 is a number which is sometimes used for this, and, moreover, this property is actually independent of the version number.
This property is inofficially marked as PROPERTIES="live" and can be checked with eix --properties-live. Unfortunately, most ebuilds do not properly mark this inofficial feature. Complain about the corresponding ebuild authors (and the pms crazyness to not include such a property officially due to bikesheddding for many years).
In any case, building support for searching for version numbers in eix only to work around a missing pms feature would be the wrong way: Searching for version numbers really makes no sense when you think about it...
For portage, this is a different story, since you must be able to emerge a particular version.

from eix.

Closing, since there is not much I can reasonably do about. CANTFIX

from eix.