Should these functions be available through the standard FFI? IMHO they should. Their functionality on a variety of concrete types can be archieved by using C, in an ugly and inefficient way. FFI already contains the level of unsafety they are at. They are useful, especially in the context of FFI. They are used all over hslibs: Concurrent, SocketPrim, Posix, MatchPS, XmlParse, Memo, Readline, Select, QuickCheckBatch, Unique. I used them in 5 out of 8 bindings to random C libraries (Bzip2, Curses, Libgr, Readline, Zlib). They are available in all four Haskell implementations, only through different modules. -- __("< Marcin Kowalczyk * qrczak@knm.org.pl http://qrczak.ids.net.pl/ \__/ ^^ SYGNATURA ZASTÊPCZA QRCZAK