On Monday 02 June 2003 2:32 pm, Simon Marlow wrote:
Ok. But I still don't understand why the whole discussion isn't moot. I can't see how to acquire a value of type T that isn't bottom.
Whether you can acquire values of this type or not, we need to give it a semantics.
We know that T must contain bottom.
Not necessarily - GHC's primitive types don't contain bottom. But I'm probably just being awkward, since I really don't understand what it is you're trying to do here.
Could you give an example?
No , I probably can't come up with an example as things stand at the moment. But who knows what changes we might make in the future and when we do, we're bound to do better if our semantics relfects reality instead of relying on a trick.
I'd be happy for semantics to reflect reality - but what *is* the reality that you're trying to model? And what do you mean by a trick? As far as I can tell, you want a type T that represents a foreign object. What is the representation of this foreign object? How is it marshalled to and from the foreign language? I think an example would really help. Invent some syntax and extra features if you need to! Cheers, Simon